Easier Piano Man Guitar Lesson - No Barre Chords Needed!

Hey, guitar enthusiast. Lauren Bateman here. And we're going to be doing a piano song on the guitar. It's called Piano man. And I'm going to show you a simplified way to have fun with it right now. So let's talk about the chords we're going to be using. Now this song has a lot of slash chords because of the nature of the piano. So we're going to be simplifying this. It won't be at the absolute beginner level, but we do have a lot of open chords. We have a C chord, G chord, we have a D chord, a D7 chord, and D7 and D are interchangeable. But it's going to sound much better if you can't play that D7 chord. We also have an A minor chord that's going to come in. And then we do have an F chord. Oh, I'm sorry, it's a bar chord. But caveat. You could use this F major 7 chord, which makes it really easy to go between F and C. Okay. And I'll do a little bit of playing with both for you. I do like the sound of the full bar chord, but if you have trouble with bar chords, this F major 7 to C. I mean, you can just look at that. I'm playing this four major, F major seven, first and second. Sorry, first and third fingers stay in place and then I just have to move kind of this middle finger up and down.

Much better than going.

Okay. So that's just a little hint, a little caveat if you want to try and make this beginner again, we're not doing this to the absolute beginner level, but I am going to make it a lot easier than having to play all the walk downs you hear in the song.

So let's talk about the timing of this song. It's very, very important. This song is what we call a waltz feel. So when I play this song, I feel like I want to sway. And that means we're counting in three or we're counting in six. So let me just play it for you. And you can see or you can feel what I'm saying. So it's.

See, how does this sway?

Da da da da da da.

So we're swaying back and forth with this strumming. So we're going to start off, it's in six, eight times. So what that means is we're counting to six. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3, four, five, six. And we're playing each chord for only three of those beats for the most part. Of this song. So if I take this first verse, my first four chords are going to be a C chord, a G chord, an F chord, or an F major, 7A, and then back to a C chord. Okay, so again, C, G, F, C. So if I take that, it would.

Be 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3, 1- 2, 3.

Okay, most simplest form.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3, four, five, six.

So this is a little tip for you when you're counting. So this song is in 6, 8. So you should be counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. But when I have songs like this where there's a lot of chord changes, I will just count to three twice. Because if you do that, one, two, three, one, two, three, that's six beats, right? So whether you're counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, doesn't really make the difference here. So I tend to count in threes when they're splitting measures. So again, if I go through, that'd.

Be 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1st, 2, 3, 1, two, three.

And now if we put all down strums, it's gonna sound like this.

One, two, three, one, two, three, one, 2, 3.

The regular crowd shuffles in.

There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gym.

Okay, see, I just did F major 7. Totally fine. Okay. No issues there. So that is kind of the simple way to go about strumming this song. But if you heard me, I kind of had a flow to it.

Okay? And that's how when I would perform this song live, that's how I would play it. Now, the caveat to this is your chord changes have to be much quicker because we're doing much more strumming. But the count for this is we're still sticking with that. You know that six, eight, time. I'm going to count to three again, and it's going to be one, two and three. And so it's down, down, up, down, up. And we're going to be doing that once per chord.

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

Okay, so that's it, very slow.

One, two and three and one, two and three and one, 2 and 3 and.

And then at full speed, it's a little bit more peppier. So it's kind of 1, 2, 3, 3.

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

So see how quickly you have to move between these chords. That's again, why I Want to recommend this? If you're trying to do this at an easier beginner, more or late beginner level, using that F major 7 is going to help you go between F, C, F, C.

It's going to help you switch between those chords much, much easier. So if you go over my website, laurenbaby.com, you'll see all the notes for this song. You're gonna see a lot of slash chords. So you might see something that says G, B or F slash, A. And all we're gonna do is we're just gonna play the first chord. Alright, this is accommodating for all the piano walk.

Butchering it. But there's a lot of like these walk downs that are happening on the piano. Because when you play piano you've got your left hand playing the bass and you got your right hand playing the treble. And there's different ways you can play these chords to accommodate some of these walk downs. I will show you one later. But for now, whenever you see a slash chord, you're just gonna play the first chord. Ignore the chord after the slash. So if I take a look at this intro, it's gonna be C to G and then F to C and then it's gonna be C chord twice. Okay, D7, G. And then we have C, G, F, C, F for a full measure, C, F. And then we're just going to stay on G on the end.

Okay, we're not going to do the walk down for that last measure. So let's take this from the intro and play through a little bit and then I'll talk to you a bit about the la dee da part. We're going to get into our A minor chord and I'll show you an interesting chord we're going to use on that part. But let's take this from the intro. We'll go nice and slow first and then I'll pick up the speed. So we got 1, 2, 3, 1 2, 3.

It's 9 o' clock on a Saturday.

The regular crowd shuffles in. There's an old man sitting next to me making love to start again.

All right, so now you kind of get a feel for the intro in that first verse and we'll skip ahead to the la di da part. Okay, so we got this part that goes la.

Da da.

There's all these, these walk downs. We're not going to put them in. What we're going to do is we're just going to hold the A minor chord. So we got la.

De I Like.

This chord, this is D, F sharp. Could you just play the D chord? It'd be fine.

Totally fine. Works great, but kind of gives you that feel of the piano there. So usually you'd have a walk down where you go A minor.

And you'd have like this G in the bass note. So there's really cool parts here. So we're just going to hold on to A minor. But I want to challenge you to try this D slash, F sharp. Now, I like to do it with my thumb over the top because I'm lazy. My guitar teacher hated that I did it. It's supposed to be done this way. I don't like it. I'm lazy. So I like to just curl my thumb over the top. The trade off is that you kind of put your wrist out of position when you do that. And if you are not flexible enough, it could not be possible. Or if you don't have enough flexibility in your wrist, you might not be able to do that. So again, if you can't, regular D chord's fine. I just think it has a really cool sound. D, F. Another great song that has that Zombie by the Cranberries. There's a lot of songs that use that chord. So it's a song that. It's a chord that does pop up a lot. So it's well worth getting familiar with and getting to know. So here on this la di da part, we have our A.

A, G.

C, G7. Okay, so we have another seven chord that comes in. This one's easy to get in and out of. From a C chord, you're just going to take your first finger down, one top, two fingers up, a string each. It's just a really wide C chord. Okay, so again, la di da from the top. So you got A minor.

And then we got our chorus.

Sing us a song, your piano man.

Sing us a song tonight when we're all in the blue Or a melody and you got us feeling all right.

Now you can see the chord progression for this song. Even though the chords are quite quick, the chord progression's very repetitive. So it's a C chord, G chord, F C. And then it goes F, C, D7G. Okay. And then it kind of repeats a little bit. But the chord progression for the verses and the choruses are exactly the same. So once you get the feel for this strumming pattern and a feel for how fast you can move the chords, you can really pick up the speed and get in line with the feel of this song. Alright, so I'm going to play through this one more time. We're going to do the intro, the first two verses, the la de da part, and the chorus. And I'm going to do this up to speed so that you guys can have something to practice along with if I'm going too fast. This song is peppy. Use the settings cog slow me down. And you can always go to my website laurenbatement.com to follow along with the notes there. So we got 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3.

It's 9 o' clock on a Saturday.

The regular crowd shuffles in there's an old man sitting next to me Making love to his tonic again.

Says son, can you lay me a memory? I'm not really sure how it goes but it's sad and it's sweet and I knew it completely When I wore a younger man's clothes Light it up, light it up.

La.

We'll sing as a song Piano man.

Sing us a song tonight and we're all in the moody you got us feeling all right.

Now if you enjoy playing songs in this six, eight time, I would highly recommend you go check out my Norwegian Wood lesson right over there by the Beatles. They'll show you a cool lead line and some more strumming, almost very similar to what we did in this lesson here.