Brown Eyed Girl Guitar Lesson for Beginners!

I'm going to show you how to play Brown Eyed Girl on the guitar. I'm going to show you different strumming patterns that you can use from easiest to a little bit more intricate. But first, let's start off with the chords we're going to use for this song. Now, the reason I love teaching Brown Eyed Girl to beginner guitar players is because it only uses four simple chords. They're going to be the G chord, the C chord, the D chord, and the E minor chord. And yes, if you know my easy two finger variations of these chords, you, you can use those on this song too. And the other thing that's great about this song is not only are the chords nice and easy, but the chord progression is easy. Now, a chord progression is the order in which the chords are played. For the majority of this song, it is gcgd, which makes it nice and easy to remember. So now that we know what chords we're going to be using on the song, let's talk about the different strumming patterns.

Now let's start off with a couple of simple strumming patterns and then I'm going to get into more intricate strumming patterns for those of you who are looking for a little bit more of a challenge. And if you don't know me, my name is Lauren Bateman and I help make guitar make sense. And that's what I do. I break songs down and try to make them easy so you can play them and have a lot of fun with them. So let's talk about the first drumming pattern. The simplest way to do this is just to do four down strums per chord. So if we took that chord progression, G, C, G, D, it would be 1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Okay, Nice and easy. Very, very easy. Kilter. And the song is peppy, so you might have to pick up those chord changes just a little bit.

It'd be one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. 1, 2, 3, 4. One, 2, 3, 4.

Now, if you're someone whose chord changes aren't quite up to speed yet, I know for a lot of you that C to G chord change is a pain in the butt. But don't worry, this is an option I do with my students when I used to teach in person is we would take the strumming pattern I like to use on the song and we cut it in half. What do I mean by that? So it means we're just going to do a down, down, up for each chord. So we're Only doing strumming on the first two beats. The last two beats, we're changing to the next chord. It gives us time to play the song in time, but get to the next chord. And I always tell students, especially beginners, it's not about how fast or how cool you can play your strumming. It's all about timing. So if you're playing something and you're going.

To.

That doesn't sound good. Keep it in time. We will get the strumming faster and better as your chord changes get faster. So what you can do here is.

You can go 1, 2 and 3, 4. 1, 2 and 3, 4. 1, 2 and 3, 4. 1, 2 and 3, 4 dot down, down, up.

Now here you can see I'm holding the chords. I would ideally say, hey, strum. And then start getting to your next chord. But you can see we're in time with the music. But it gives us those extra couple beats to get into the next chord. Now, the full strumming pattern I will be using, which is probably a little bit trickier, we call this a syncopated strumming pattern because we're missing a. A down strum on one of the beats, and that's going to be the third beat. So this strumming pattern is going to be 1, 2 and. And 4. And so it's the first half of the pattern. We just did 1, 2 and 3 and 4.

And so it's a down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, down, up.

And for those of you who know me, you know I like to. To sing sing when I strum, because I feel if you can sing things, it helps you with understanding the rhythm more. So let's play through a chord progression with that strumming pattern so you can get it down. I'll go nice and slow. So we got 1, 2 and. And 4, and 1, 2 and.

1, 2. And.

Let's try one more time to.

Now, if you find that syncopation is just a little bit too much for you, you just need a little bit more practice. All you have to do is just add the down strum in on that third beat. So be one, two and three and.

Four and one, two and three and four. And one, two and three and four dot.

So whichever strumming pattern is going to work best for you, pick that and you can use it for the entire song. Now, before we go through a playthrough and before I show you how to play the intro section to the song, what I want to do is talk about the two parts in the song where things change up a little bit. So I said most of this song is G, C, G, D. There is a section at the end of the verses where we go C, D, G, E minor and then C, D, G. Okay, so it changes up just a little bit on the end of all of these verses. And we also have the part. Do you remember when. When we used to sing and that part's just hanging out on a D chord.

Do you remember when.

We used to.

Sing Sha la la la la la la la la.

And then it goes right back into that first chord progression. So I'm going to do a quick playthrough of each part. I'll do an intro so we can get our timing down. I'm going to do verse and I'm going to do one of the sha la la la parts so that we can get through that. If I'm going too fast, use the settings cog right there to slow me down. Ready? Here we go. One, two, A one, two.

Intro.

One.

Here we go.

Hey where did we go.

The days when the rain came.

Down in the hollow.

Playing a new game.

Laughing and running.

Hey hey. Skipping and jumping.

In the mist Moaning fog with our hearts thumping and you.

My brown eyed girl.

You're my brown eyed girl.

Do you remember when.

When we used.

To sing Sha la la la la la la la la la.

Shalala la de.

So if you had fun playing along to this song, you're really gonna enjoy learning the intro. And you can do that by going over to that video right over there where I'm gonna show you three simple chord shapes you can use to play the intro to this song.