Learn to Play About Rain by Sequoyah Prep School on Guitar

Hello guys, this is Aaron. This is actually a request by a band called Seqouyah Prep School. The song is called About Rain and I want to teach a little video on it. It is a pretty simple song to play. There are two ways you can play it. Basically it depends on whether you have a capo or not. Standard tuning and what we are going to start out with is without the capo. So, if you are going to play without capo. The four chords are Am, F, C and G. That is not with the capo but without. What we are going to do is, the first one that you are going to start out in -- barre across the 4th fret, only the bottom five strings and then you want to -- you are going to try, you can barre across all six if you want but the best case scenario is you if you can try and mute these top strings, so you are not going to be playing it because you want this to be your base note. And then, so you barre across down the 4th fret, take your middle finger on the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5th string down. Put your ring finger on the 5th fret and one above your barre and on the 1, 2, the 3rd string down. You are going to put your ring finger on the 6th fret which is two down from the barre and then your pinky on the 4th string down. 1, 2, 3, 4 on the same fret. The 6th fret. That is your first chord. [Demo] That is the verse one that plays. [Demo] And then it switches up here. So, we are going to use this barre chord now. All you are going to do is slide everything up one fret, so it is where your barre across the 4th before. Now, you are going to slide up to the 5th and you want to barre across all six strings. And then you just move all these fingers up one string. So, as here, you go on the 5th fret on the 5th string down and move that on the 4th. But you put your 4th string on the 6th fret. You are just going to move everything up one fret. And then your ring finger is going to go up a string, it will go on the 2nd string, 7th fret. And your pinky will be up one more string. So, that will be on the 3rd string, 7th fret. So you have barre across the 5th, ring finger on the 1, 2, 3, the 4th string down on the 6th fret and then your ring finger and pinky on the 2nd, 3rd strings on the 7th fret. That is the 2nd chord. So, being it will sound like this. [Demo] And if from there, it goes all the way up through. You slide your barre up to the 7th fret. And then you want to actually play the 3rd, 4th and 5th string all on this 9th fret. [Demo] So, the way I do it is if you can kind of do that, pretend the strings are here that will be the shape you make where it comes down, it flattens out and that is what I use. I barre across all the 7th fret and the 9th fret, the 3rd, 4th and 5th strings down, I barre across that. [Demo] And this is how it sounds. [Demo] And you take that whole shape. [Demo] Then the 2nd fret. So, on the 2nd fret, you are barring across all and you are playing B3 here on the 4th fret. So, the same formation. You barre, skip this fret empty and then you have 3rd, 4th, 5th string covered on the same thing out here. So, that together sounds like this. [Demo] So, now I want to teach it with the capo. That’s really -- before I am going to capo, that is the whole song. It is just those four chords there. So, now with the capo, you are going to put your capo on the 4th fret. This is the way I saw it, they played it on the live version of the video I found on You Tube and the other one I found, I am playing it with just the barre chords. You are playing with capo on the 4th fret. The four chords are Am -- [Demo] F to C, G. So, the first one is Am. So, this is what an Am is. You have your -- these top two strings are open, no fingers on them. 3rd string down which is your D string, you want to have your middle finger on the 2nd fret. The 4th string down, you are going to have your ring finger 2nd fret. 5th string down and you are going to have your pointer finger on the first fret. The basic strum pattern is like -- [Demo] That switches to F. So, Am and when you go to F, you are going to play the barre chord F where you barre all the wa