How to Play Have You Ever Seen the Rain on Acoustic Guitar

Hey Rhythm Strummers, here are really easy way to play this great song. [Demonstration] Now I can only play you about 30 seconds of the song, so I’m going to stop here for a second a show you a strum pattern and some chords that will work for this song and a ton of other great songs. Okay, let’s check out the strum pattern. Grab a G chord and as you can see in this diagram we’ve got down and up arrows alternating and those tell you to strum down and up like this— [Demonstration] And then we’ve got accent arrows on the 2 and the 4 which goes like this— [Demonstration] And then we’re going to add some what I called whacks in here which go on in the 2 and the 4. So as you can see in this next diagram, we’ve got an X on the 2 and the 4 arrows which means there’s no chord sounding there and the W above it means you’ll whack in the strings when you’re doing it. It sounds like this— [Demonstration] Like that, now if you haven’t done a whack before, you may not be calling it a whack but a lot of you have probably done this before. If you haven’t, it’s a difficult skill so let me take a couple of moment to explain it. There are couple different ways to hold, to position your hand when you do a whack. Some people like to mute with the palm of their hand and they’re kind a hit it with there palm. I use the inner part of the hand, the karate chop part right here and so I’m going to show you how to do that technique. Hold your pick and make kind of an okay sign and what that’s going to do is give you a nice big area to mute all the strings. One of the difficult things about a whack is that sometimes people still get strings ringing when they do it and so making your hand bigger will cover all the strings. And then when you want to do is find and angle where you don’t need to make much hand movement, you just bring your arm down and the pick hits the strings a split second after your hand hits the strings. And so it makes this muted sound, it sounds a lot like a snare drum and so in the strum pattern making the sound in the 2 and the 4, that’s the same sound that the snare drum its making you in the drums and the song the uses a strum pattern. So, let’s try this a little bit, just come down on the strings at an angle not fair low to the face of the guitar, but coming a little bit of an angle so that your hands kind of crashing into the strings and then you want your hand to stop on the strings not slide down across them. Happen to stop on the strings, the pick rakes across the strings and you get that kind of sound. You need to make a little flick with your wrist to the last second to get the pick to rake across the strings. But it’s not that big of a movement, almost the all the movement is done with your arm. So fool around with that for a little, try not to hurt yourself. Next we need to figure out how to strum up after a whack. What you want to do is make sure that the pick lands below the strings when you finished your whack so that you can go immediately into an up strum. Check this out. [Demonstration] See that? The pick comes down below the strings and then I may be able to strum up. So practice the whack some more like this and make that the pick comes all the way down below the strings. And then when you’re ready, do this— [Demonstration] That sounds good! I have no idea how that song, I hope you’re getting it. Okay, so now let’s try working it into the strum pattern. I’m going to do this nice and slow. [Demonstration] That sounds good! I have no idea how that song, I hope you’re not hurting yourselves. [Demonstration] I’m going to slow it down a little bit more. [Demonstration] Okay, so that strum pattern is not going to do you any good if you can’t make chord changes over it and so let’s bring in a couple new chords. The C chord and the F chord the dreaded F chord. Now if the F Chord freaks you out, you’re not alone. Go to RhythmStrummer.com and there’s a free lesson section there with a lesson on it dedicated to F chords, so that will be a big help. Okay, so I’m going to play a chord progression now that starts with the F chord we’re doing one measure of F, one measure of G and two measures of C, that’s the second measure. Okay, so let me start back on the F chord and then count you in. [Demonstration] Back to F. [Demonstration] I hope you’re not crashing and burning. [Demonstration] All right, so this is how that’s fit in the song now. [Demonstration] All right, we I hope you got a lot out of this lesson and if you’d like to learn the rest of it go to RhythmStrummer.com. See you later.