How to Play Big Green Tractor by Jason Aldean

How to Play “Big Green Tractor” by Jason Aldean

Hey, what’s up everybody? It’s Aaron from FreeandEasyGuitar.com and I got a country song I want to teach you tonight. It’s called “Big Green Tractor” by Jason Aldean. It’s a good song. It’s so popular right now. I had a lot of request but I guess the biggest reason is last week I was in Nashville and I got to hang out for a couple of days at the Treasure Isle Recording Studio which is actually where Jason Aldean records all his stuff so. It was pretty cool and I got some videos that I’ve post up here probably in a couple of months because the God that I was actually and they’re hanging out, kind of watching and record this album. It will be out for a while. So, you can’t impersonate these videos until the CD actually comes out.

So, this song “Big Green Tractor” it has got about six chords I’ll say. The first four in the intro, I’m going to teach you and the intro sound like this.

[Demonstration]

The first chord is an E chord. If you don’t know any of these chords are shaken, if I say B suspended and you don’t know what that is or B sus. There are two things you can do. You can google it you can listen to while I tell you where to put your fingers and the third thing is you can go to FreeandEasyGuitar.com. I have a thing called JGuitar on the bottom right hand side of the page. It says JGuitar, it’s got a place where all you do is type in the name of the chord and it will give you picture of it.

The first four chords is an E chord. It’s the first one and the strum pattern is down, up-down, up-down and you’re going to play down-up whereas if you switch to your next chord. So your first one is an E chord, your second chord is a B suspended. You can play at B bar chord if you want but I just think that this is not here. It really doesn’t add anything or to it so I just like playing a B suspended because it’s easier.

So, from E to the B suspended, I want to give you guys some kind of a trick. Now, if you look at the B suspended chord which is where your pointer finger bar across the bottom pad and second for it in the ring and take you on the two middle strings, your D and G, capo on the fourth fret so this one is muted, lowly up playing it and then bar across bar flag and then ring and pinky on the fourth fret of your two middle strings.

This chord here B sus, if you notice these two fingers obviously are the two middle strings. Now, if you slide those down two frets. Lift your pinky off and then put your middle finger and point it on your back at the E chord. So when you switch from your E or B sus an easy way to do that is to remember you lift your pointer and you lift your middle off, your rings are going to stay there and you put your pinky behind it on the G string, second fret. Slide those two up to the fourth fret and then quit your bar on last. And the same strum pattern is B sus.

[Demonstration]

From there, what you’re going to do is you’re going to move these two fingers up a fret. So this was on the D string and this was on the G string fourth fret. This brings when you moves up and now it’s only A string fourth fret, pinky moves up now it’s on the D strings fourth fret and your bar chords are all six strings. In this chord is called F#m chord. Same strum pattern and your last chord is an A chord and we do same strum pattern with that. You can strum it once.

So that’s where the intro is. The verse for the whole song is just like that except there’s a little bit of variations and your first chord is still that E chord, same strum pattern.
[Demonstration]

We’ll pick these two up, put that pinky finger down, slide up to the fourth fret and your bar comes down for the B suspended.

[Demonstration]

But this time instead of going up here to the F#m where you did the intro, you’re going to slide everything up two more frets so your pointer finger is now bar across the bottom touch strings fourth fret. The ring and your pinky on the sixth fret, two middle strings and your middle finger comes down on the fifth fret of your B string and this is a C#m chord. And you can Google the names of this chord C#. Sharp is a number sign and then minor so you just put “m”. So, C#m, you put the same strum pattern.

And then you going to slide down and the easy way to do this is just lift this up and slide this down the same fret. Slide them up to the fourth fret, put that bar down. First, like we just did is this first part E chord, A suspended, C#m, A suspended, B suspended and repeat again.

So we did that twice and once for each verse. There’s a double first verse which you mean before the first chorus, there are going to be like two verses but you just call it double first verse because in it’s your first chorus and your second verse second chords. So that is the actual pattern for the verse. The chorus is almost exactly the same but with a little variation. So the chorus is kind of like the intro. So for the chorus you’re going to play and E chord first, the same strum pattern to B suspended to F#m to an A and then repeat. So that’s for the chorus.

The bridge is really short. The bridge actually goes from—you’re going to finish the second chorus so play the second chorus the second time through and it goes like this.

[Demonstration]

So your bridge is go C#m to A, A suspended. I'm playing A suspended again, C#m, just like that song proceeds, blah-blah-blah. I’m going to put this all together here at the end in a cover. That’s really the whole song. You get your verse and your chorus are the same. The only thing that differs between the verse and chorus is in the verse you’re using as your third chord the C#m and for the fourth chord, you’re using half a measure of A and half a measure of B.

Now the chorus you’re using as your third chord this F#m then use an A and you mix that B in and if you don’t like that B you can just leave with an A for the whole measure. I may cut this off here and we go in the bathroom where we get better acoustics. And you guys can hopefully see this song all together.

I hope you all can see all right. Though I want have further but I’m not really familiar with the lyrics of the song yet so I ‘m going to try to sing along with the help of the song with lyrics, bear with me and we’ll be talking through this is like kind to be like cover and we try to explain the chords to you.

[Demonstration]

And then the A, then you just play the E, the same first strum, your B suspended same strum pattern then you strum the A with the same strum pattern for then you put the down up and finish on E. You can finish the song with any chord you want but it’s always great to finish one with what you started with. It just makes it and I want the theory and reason for this but this will sound you better and the end on the quarter key it started whatever.

So hope it all goes well and check out for our FreeandEasyGuitar.com and I hope you had a wonderful lesson.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services