With a Little Help from My Friends Acoustic Guitar Lesson

Hey rhythm strummers! I’ve got a really great way to play this Beatle song. [Demonstration/Singing] I could only sing about 30 seconds of that, so I’m going to save something for you later, but let me show you what I was doing in there that I think it’s really cool and you can use all kinds of music including this song. Okay, here’s the strum pattern I’d like to teach you for this song. It gives a lot of song and it’s good in that one. If you look at the strum pattern diagram beside me here, you’ll see there are four arrows pointing down and a count one, two, three, four underneath and the idea is that each down arrow means a downward strum. We’re playing a D chord here, and so if we’re counting one, two, three, four. We play one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, very simple. Now, noticed we’ve now added some dots over the arrows? What the dots mean staccato, don’t let the note ring forever but you did it out after you played it. So I’m going to do that with what’s called palm muting by letting my hand touch the string as near the bridge. Now, we have a whole bunch of a lesson in our technique library all about palm muting giving. So if you want to know about that, you can check that. For the moment the idea is you just go strum and then touch the strings, but now with those dots, we count one, two, three, four and strum one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four [Demonstration]. Notice, there’s some lot crisper when you did this. [Demonstration] That’s great. Okay, now we go to the tricky part. We’ve added to this pattern, we’ve added some arrows that have B over them, and they come in between the beats. One is on the end of two and one is on the end of four, so this represents based notes. It doesn’t matter specifically what base note, just kind of a low note as opposed a whole strum of the chord. So this means we’re playing strum, strum, base strum, strum, base strum, strum, strum, base strum, strum, base, strum. [Demonstration] So that if you want to do that with me, I’ll one, two and three, four and one, two, and three, four and one, two and three, four, and one, two, and three four, and one, two, and three, four and one, two and three, four. [Demonstration] That is great ha. You can imagine now this might be play in any number of songs. But now, interesting playing comes about, what all about chord changes. When the chord is changed, what base note do you hit? Base note is from what chord? You can hit pretty much any of the base notes that are in the chord but hard chord. Well, it turns out that what we really work is to play the base note form the chord that’s coming. So if instance, if we were to have something where we’re playing two chords in the row, like say we’re playing a D chord and a C chord and we were playing. [Demonstration] And we want to add that base note in. Where do you took the base note from when were about to go to the C chord? We take it from the C-chord. So we play, D, D, D, C, C. [Demonstration] Can you see that [Demonstration] To do this, I’m changing the chord earlier than the rhythm otherwise. And this happen in the songs sometimes they do things like [Demonstration] So let’s try that. Let’s try just a little bit of the song with little help for my friends in the chorus where it says [Demonstration/Singing] Cool, good job.