How to Play Neil Young's Cinnamon Girl on Guitar

Hi I'm Andy Aledort and in today’s lesson I'm going to teach you how to play the classic Rock song Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” “Cinnamon Girl” is played in an unusual tuning; it’s called “Double Drop D”. “Double Drop D” is where you tune both of your strings—the 6th string and the 1st string down a whole step to D. So the tuning across all of the strings, going from 6th to 1st string would be B, A, D, G, B, and D. “Cinnamon Girl” features two distinct electric guitar parts. They may both be played by Neil but perhaps not because the song is recorded with the band “Crazy Horse”. And “Crazy Horse” had two different other guitar players depending on when it was; Danny Wilson originally and Neil—after that. So it could be one of those guys, there are both parts could be played by Neil. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you first the most straightforward way to play the song. There are lots of little intricate picking things when you listen to the record, and distinct differences between those guitar parts, and the way the two parts weave together is what makes it sound so cool. But if you watch Neil Young play the song, he plays it in a much more straightforward manner. So I'm going to show you how to play it like that first because its quickest and most useful way to play the song, and then we’ll take a look at all those little variations that you can do—little ways to arpeggiate the chords or add little riffs to embellish the song a little more. So let’s start with the “Cinnamon Girl” intro. 1, 2, 3 and… [Demonstration] Alright, so what Neil does is he goes from C to D, but the way he plays it is without a rude note on the A string. It’s like typical 5th string rude bark or it’s that go from C to D and then the other thing is with the drop D tuning on top, you could actually lick for us all the string and get your major chord like that. Normally, the note would be back here—on a D chord it would be like that but with the drop tuning that’s not the right note. So the main guitar, and if you watch the videos of Neil, you see him just go—so you can bark for us the D, G and B strings or if you want get all four touch strings, either is fine. Then you’re going to switch to a C chord so that’s 3rd fret to the A, 2nd fret to the D, open G, 1st fret to the B and we’re going to walk down to A string but after hitting the whole chord. So you can see I'm hitting more than just a—the A string. I'm at least hitting the A and the D, if not, the G string as well Then we’re going to land index finger across the bottom 3 strings at the 3rd fret. Because in drop D tuning with the low D on the bottom, what would normally be an F5 chord fretted like that, that F note now is up at the 3rd fret because we tuned the string down, you have to higher to get the same note. And it facilitates power chords in the bottom—3 strings. You could just lay across a fret on those 3 strings and get power chords. So one more time [Demonstration] Or [Demonstration] Switching to the index finger which sets up to move index; the ring on the 5th fret—F5 to G5, and that repeats, the thing is you just hang on the F, you don’t play the G again, that’s played twice into the verse.