We’re going to take a look at a really, really pretty easy, fun strumming song by Radiohead. So if you know, what I'm talking about is Karma Police which was on their third album, OK Computer, came out in 1997. Now of course Radiohead came on the scene a couple years earlier with Creep, it was kind of their first thing that jumped out and everybody heard. But these guys have a lot of really, really cool acoustic guitar-based song and some electric guitar songs and songs and some screaming things too. But what I want to talk about in this lesson, we’ll just take a short look at this because it’s not very complicated. You do have to play some bar chords. We’re going to use some Fs and some F#s and B minors. These are the three main bars that are going to happen in there. But otherwise most of the chords should have all of them down pretty well and a very simple little strumming pattern that can be varied in lots of different ways.
We’re also going to take a quick look at what the piano does. At one point we hear this—
[Demonstration]
There’s a nice little piano lick in there but it wasn’t that but I’ll show it to you when I get there. So the chart that I have for this just has the chord progressions at the top to the three sections, the verse, the chorus and the bridge. I'm calling it a bridge but it’s really the outro to the song because once it comes in, it’s the last thing you hear. So take a look at the page, print it out, PDF there, should be available, easily downloadable from right where you are, and an A minor chord. We’re going to start with A minor and the main thing that has to happen through the song is you need to hear a bass note on the first beat of every measure, partly because that’s what the bass does but also, the guitar part sounds really good if you just hit a bass note on the first beat and another bass note on the second beat but a little softer, it doesn’t really matter that the second bass note is too important. So what I try to do is hit the fifth string and then the fourth string or just in the vicinity of the fourth string as two quarter notes, a down on the fifth string, a down on the fourth string and then a span of eighth notes. It can either be down, down, up, which would be a quarter and 2/8 or down, up, down, up.
So very simply on A minor, you get it right. Bass, bass, down, up, down, up or bass, bass, down, down, up. Now, let’s just talk through the chords. In the verse we have a minor followed by a minor with F sharp in the bass, which is not really A minor with F sharp in the bass. If you go back and check some of my theory lessons, we talked about this chord especially in While My Guitar Gently Weeps, a George Harrison song. But you're going to play it by just reaching, taking your second finger from the fourth string and moving it to the sixth string, leaving the other two fingers where they are. For technical, theoretical reasons, this would really be a D9 with F# in the bass but we think of it as A minor with F# in the bass and then you're going to hit the same two bass notes, sixth string because we want the F# first and then the fourth string and then down, up, down, up or down, down, up again. It doesn’t matter too much. Then the E minor.
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