Dreams Guitar Lesson by Fleetwood Mac

Hey, guitar enthusiasts. I have a great song here by Fleetwood Mac called Dreams. I'm gonna show you how to play it even if you don't have a.

Full band behind you.

And I'll show you some easy ways to do it as well as some more late beginner ways to approach it. So let's start off with our chords. We have five different chords we're gonna be using for this song. We have a G chord. Okay. We also have my EZG chord, the G6 chord. So you can interchange those if you're a beginner. Okay. And you can't play the full G chord yet. Just use the easy G chord. Totally fine. We've got an A minor chord. Very nice. We also have the F major 7 chord. Okay. And we do have a full F bar chord. Now, if you don't like bar chords yet or you can't play barre chords yet, don't worry. Just use this F major 7. Because we're going to be transitioning a lot between F and G pretty much the. The entire song.

Okay.

Some other chords come in a little bit later, but most of the song is just F and G. So even if you're an absolute beginner and you only know my beginner G6 chord. Okay. You can do the easy F major 7. Okay. You can go in between G. You might just have to practice this back and forth just a little bit. Okay. So we have the third finger on the third fret of the D string. Second finger on the second fret of the G string, first finger on the first fret of the B string. Now, if you want the full F major 7 like they do in the song, these two fingers are not going to change. What's going to happen is this third finger is just going to move up to the third fret on the A string, and the pinky is going to go right below it. Third fret on the D string. We have this beautiful open sounding F major 7. Fleetwood Mac uses this chord a lot. It's a great sounding chord.

Now I'm going to show you how Fleetwood Mac really kind of strums this intro section. But it's going to be very hard to strum this and sing this at the same time. So I'm going to show you how I would go around playing this song if I were going to do it live. But first, let's talk about the way Fleetwood Mac does it. So the timing on this is. It's an F chord. Okay? So we have F. And if you need to use F major 7. That's fine. So it's going to be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. So that's what we're going to do. On the F. We're not just strumming on specific notes.

So it's 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Again, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

And then we're going to switch to a G chord or the G6, whichever one you want to use. And that's going to be 1 and.

2 and 3 and 4.

And so the F is going to be played on 2 and 4. And the G is going to be played on 2 and 3. So it's kind of like a weird timing if you've never done this before. We're going to take it nice and slow. I'll count it out with you. On the F, we're going for 2 and 4. On the G, we're going for 2 and 3. Ready? So we got 1, 2, 3 and 4.

And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and two and three and four. And 1 and two and three &.

Four.

Four. And 1 and two and three, four. And 1 and two and 3 and four. One and two and three and four. And 1 and two and three and four. And 1 and two and three and.

4. So if we sped that up just a little bit more, it'd be 1, 2, 3 and.

4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and two and three and four. And 1 and 2 and 3, and 4. And 1 and 2, 2 and 3 and.

4. M.

Okay, so that's what. When you listen to the record, that's what you're going to hear the guitar doing. The guitar isn't doing a lot of strumming and a lot of Fleetwood Mac songs. The guitar isn't doing a heck of a lot sometimes. But I'm going to show you, if I was going to play this and sing this song, I wouldn't play that rhythm. But if you want to play along with the record, that's going to work great. But I'm going to show you what I would do to sing and play this song, you know, for family and friends. So let's take our verse. Now, the intro. Again, it's F, G, F, G, F, G. And that's what we're going to be doing in this verse. So the simple strumming pattern. Again, I'm going to use an F bar chord. If you want to use F major 7, perfectly fine. It's going to sound great either way. Okay. So I'm going To use an F chord. And I'm going to do a simple strum with which is gonna be.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and.

4. Play down, up, down, up down, up down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

Just down, up, down, up down, up down, up, down, up down, up, down.

Up. Now here you go again. You say you want your.

Freedom.

Well, who am I to keep.

Down?

As you can see, that's much easier to sing over them.

It'd be very difficult for me to sing over that. I probably could do it if I practiced it enough, but I don't want to practice it that much. I just want to be able to play this easily for family and friends, which you probably do too. And if you don't know me, my name is Lauren Bateman and I help make the guitar make sense. And I take songs like this and I make it accessible to students so that you can play for family and friends and just have fun playing music. So that is one way to approach the strumming on this song. Now, if you want to add in a little spice, because there really is a good drive to this song, you could accent the 2 and 4. What do I mean by that? It's. It means we could just strum a little bit more aggressively on 2 and 4 to give it a little more on these verses. We're going to do something a little bit different on the choruses, but for these verses, ooh, we could really drive it a little bit more. So what am I going to do? It would sound like this.

So if you watch that close up video, you're going to see my hand. I whip it. I really whip the hand hard on that two and four beat. Watch. I got small strums and then I've got a whip that comes in. So watch my hand. Don't try playing with me right now. Just watch my hand. Ready?

See that big whip?

So now you've got a little bit, little bit more to run with on this verse, you know, so if I take it back from the beginning here we've.

Got.

Now here, go again. You say you want your.

Freedom.

Well, who am I to keep you.

Down?

Okay, so you got a little bit more drive now to your verses. And don't worry, I'm going to do a little, you know, verse and chorus run through here for you guys. At the end, we'll do a play along. But I do want to jump ahead to the chorus now because we are going to do something a little bit different. Now if you're a beginner and you're not used to hopping rhythms, just stick with the rhythm we had before. What we're going to be doing is, is we're just going to open up the strumming pattern a little bit. So all I'm going to be doing, instead of doing 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And I'm just going to do 1, 2, 3 and 4. And so we got 1, 2.

3 and 4 and 1, 2, 3 and 4and 1.

2. Now here I'm F major 7 and G6.

Now I just noticed this as I was strumming what my muscle memory did. So I'm playing F major 7. I'm playing the four finger version. I'm using my second and third fingers. I don't particularly like playing a G chord this way. I find it awkward, but I'm not playing a full G chord here. And I find just moving these fingers, look, they're maintaining the same shape. When I go back down to F major 7, look at that. They kind of have the same angle to them. So muscle memory wise.

It's much easier for me to do that. Okay, and again, this rhythm is.

Just 1, 2, 3 and.

4. And 1, 2, 3 and 4. And 1, 2, 3 and four. And 1.

2.

No accents.

Just a nice smooth rhythm. But if you are someone that's a little bit more in that late beginner level and you want to try hopping the rhythm, I feel like this is more what's happening on the record. So for the F chord, we are going to do the rhythm I just showed you. Okay. We're going to build upon. That's what I like to do. I like to teach you something and then build upon it. So we have F. Okay. And we had 1, 2, 3 and 4. And now most songs you're used to doing a down strum on the one beat. All right, Used to doing down. We're not going to do that. Okay, so it's going to be 1, 2, 3 and 4. And we're going to change to the G chord on the up strum. Okay, One, two, three and four. And one more.

Time. One, two, three and.

Four. And now to finish off this rhythm, it's going to be and 2, 3 and 4. And very different. So let's take that from the beginning again. So we get the F. 1, 2, 3 and 4. And. And 2, 3 and 4. And. And that's going to be down.

Down, down, up, down, up, up, down, down, up, down, up, down, down, down, up, down, up, up, down, down, up, down, up, down, down, down, up.

Down.

Let's pick up the speed. Ready?

Do you hear it.

Now?

Thunder only happens when it's raining.

Lay on.

The.

And you can hear. Once I start singing and I get into it, my hand kind of starts doing whatever it wants, which is a really cool thing. If that's starting to happen for you. That means your hand, your body is feeling the music. That's really great. So what I want to do now is I want to take this. I want to do a verse. We'll do a little bit of an intro. We'll do the first verse and the chorus and. And then we're just going to talk about the break where we get some new chords coming in. So let's take it from the top. Ready? 1, 2, 1.

2. Here we.

Go.

Now. Here you go again. You say you want your.

Freedom.

Well, who am I to keep you down?

It's only right there should lay the way you feel it Listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness Like a heartbeat drives you mad in the stillness of remembering what you.

Had.

And.

What you.

Lost.

And what you.

Had.

And what you.

Lost.

Chorus Ready.

For. Thunder only happens when it's raining.

Lands on and love you when they play.

Say women they will come and.

They will.

Go.

When the rainwall shells you Clean.

Your.

No.

You.

Know.

So great song. You can tell I love Fleetwood Mac. I actually, I grew up on Fleetwood Mac. My dad was a huge Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks fan, so I listened to lots of their music growing up. Now we have this break here, and we're not doing really anything too different. We do see the introduction of that a minor chord. This is where that a minor chord comes in. So we're just, you know, you could use either of the strumming patterns, whichever one suits you best. I would probably stick with the chorus strumming if you could, because this is where the, like, the little guitar solo part comes in. And I would just do the same thing.

And then we go right back into the verse section after that last F chord. Now, if you are a huge Stevie Nicks fan, like myself and my dad, go check out the edge of 17 over there. I'm going to show you how to play the really cool bass line intro as well as how to strum along to that song. Go click on that lesson. I'll see you over there.