Have You Ever Seen The Rain Guitar Lesson with FUN Walkdown!

Hey, guitar enthusiasts. We are going to be doing a guitar classic here by CCR called have youe Ever Seen the Rain? It's a great song and I'm going to show you how to play it to the beginner level but also how you can spice it up as well. So let's get started with the chords we'll be using.

So if you're a beginner, the chords I recommend using are A minor, C, G. Very, very simple chords. But there also is an F chord in this song. Now if you're familiar with bar chords, you can play it. If you're like, Lauren, I hate bar chords or I don't know bar chords yet, you can play the Easy F major 7 chord. Okay. Which looks like a C chord but you move the top two fingers down. Okay. Or if you know like the mini bar chord F, you could play that too. But those are the majority of the chords we're using. We're using A minor, G, C and then F. Okay. But you can see how easy it is to go from C to F major 7. Okay. So if you're not really great with bar chords, don't worry, you can always simplify things. So I'm going to show you a simple beginner strumming pattern that you can use for this song just to get going with it. But stick around for the second half of the video because I'm going to show you how to spice it up afterwards. Alright, so we're just going to use an eighth note strumming pattern and I'll show you how to make it sound good. So it's basically just going to be down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. Okay, so I'm playing an A minor chord.

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

And. Okay, so we're just alternating. Okay. Again, if you're. If you're strumming and you're like. And you're strumming sounding like that, it just means you're death gripping the pick too much. Relax, relax a little bit and try and loosen that grip. I know if you go too loose, it's going to end up inside the guitar or it's going to end up on the floor. Don't worry, happens to everyone. I still drop my pick to this day and I've been playing the guitar for a very, very long time. It happens. It's a tight walk finding that right grip. But try and loosen up the grip on your pick. If you can.

Okay. So you can let the guitar sing. Okay, so that is the starting point. It's just this opposite strumming pattern. Now, if you can do that, you can get that light touch. What you can do is you can kind of accent different strums.

So what I'm doing here, I'm keeping my strumming tiny on the kind of the top strings of the guitar. And then I'm 2 and 4, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, and 1 and 2. And you can see I'm strumming all the strings.

If I play this intro section, which is A minor, F, C, G, double C, it'll sound like this one, two, ready, M.

And gives it a little bit more motion. If you can't do the accents, it's perfectly fine to just go.

There's nothing wrong with that. All right. You can focus on adding those accents in later. So the verse section is great because we just get to stay on a C chord for a very long time. Okay. And then we get to switch to the G chord. Now, I know for a lot of beginner students, changing from C into G and back and forth is a very, very tough chord change. Do the best you can. My recommendation here, if that is a slow chord change, do not stop the strumming. Let your fretting hand catch up with your strumming hand. So, for example, I'm going from C into G.

So you see, I'm building the chords as I'm going, but I never stop the strumming here because it's better to do that than do this.

Okay. So when we put starts and stops into the music, it breaks up the flow. So again, a tip for you. If you're a beginner and your chord changes aren't fast enough yet, strum through the chord.

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

2.

Okay. It actually sounds way better to do that than to do the starts and stops. All right, so I'm going to take this from the top. We're going to play intro and verse. And if you need to follow along with any notes, I do have them over on my website, laurenbateman.com all right, we're going to start at the A minor chord, and I'm going to count you in. It's going to be 1, 2, 1 and 2, and 3 and 4.

And.

Someone told me long ago.

There's a calm before the storm and I.

Know.

It'S been coming for some.

Time.

When it's over so they say it'll.

Rain another day and I know.

Shining down like.

Water.

Now we jump into the chorus section. So you can see that chorus section goes right from a C to an F. And that's where if you use that F major 7, all you have to do is drop those two fingers. It'll make transitioning into that chorus a little bit easier if you don't know bar chords. All right, so the chorus starts with an F chord, and we're gonna use the same strumming pattern. I want a G. Now here's where the change comes. I've gotta walk. Now it's a walk down. It's when we do this in music.

Okay? But that's what the bass player would play. Single notes, okay? We're walking from C, B, a G. We call that a walk down, okay? In music that usually the bass player plays it, what we're going to do is we're going to mimic that by playing chords, okay? So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to explain first, and then I'll show you. It's going to be a C chord. We're going to do like a C slash, B chord. We're going to do A minor, and then we're going to do G, okay? To do that C, B chord, you're gonna move your second finger up, third finger down, okay? So it's almost like doing an E minor chord with your second and third fingers, except you have a first finger in place on the first fret of the second string, okay? So we went from here. C, C, B. Because we gotta get that B note for our walk down.

Then we're gonna go A minor for the A note and then G for the G note, okay? And on those chords, we're gonna.

Strum down, down, up, down, down, up.

Down, down, up, down, down, up, again, two, three.

Four. We got down, down, up, down, down, up, down, down, up, down, down.

Up. If I play it more up to speed, it's gonna be one, two, ready? And.

So if I put it in context now, it's gonna sound like this. One, two, here we.

Go. I want to know have you ever seen the rain?

I want to know have you ever seen the.

Rain.

Coming down on a sunny.

Day?

All right, so there you go. That is our chorus section. You can see just by changing up that strumming just a little bit in the chorus, it adds a little bit more motion, a little bit more movement. That baseline is super cool. It shows up in lots of songs. So it's a great skill to know. Now, if you're feeling good about this and you want this song to sound a little bit more like the record, to show you two other strumming patterns that you can use on the verse and the chorus. So a lot of times in songs, you won't play the same strumming pattern like we did from beginning to end. So. But for beginners, doing that will help you, you know, focus on your chord changes, focus on your timing. But there is a different strumming pattern. If you listen to the record, you're going to hear this.

Okay, you're going to hear this. Ooh, what's that? It's kind of like this round rhythm. So what we're going to do is we're going to start on the A minor chord again, and our strumming pattern is going to be down, up.

Up, down, up, up, down, up, up, down.

Up. So basically, it's one and, and three and, and one and, and three and. Okay. It becomes a little bit of a round once you do that first, first down. So it's down, up, up, down.

Up, up, down, up, up, down.

Up. So after the first down, it just becomes a bunch of up, down, ups. So if I play through that intro, it's going to be down, up, up, down, up, up, down, up, up.

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

Up. Back to C.

Okay, so that's how we can approach the verse. And then when we get to the chorus, we can switch to a different strumming pattern, and I'll play through all this for you. Once we get to the chorus, we can switch to what I call syncopated strumming pattern. It's very, very common strumming pattern. It's down, down, up, up, down, up, 1, 2, and. And 4. And I'll do it on a G for.

And.

4. And down, down, up, up, down.

Up.

And that walk down is exactly the same. So essentially now we've got three different strumming patterns we're using throughout this song, which brings it a little bit more to life. All right, so let me do a playthrough now. I'm going to use these new strumming patterns, and then you decide which one you like best. One, two, one, two.

Intro.

Someone told me long.

Ago.

There's.

A calm before the storm and I.

Know.

And it's been coming for some.

Time.

When it's over so they say.

It'Ll rain a sunny day and I know.

Shining, melt like water.

I want to know have you ever seen the rain?

I want to know have you ever seen the.

Rain? Yeah. Coming down, sunny.

Day.

Now, it might be difficult for you to switch between those two strumming patterns. So how I would practice this is I would start with one strumming pattern.

And then I would switch the other.

Without switching the chord first. Do it without switching the chord first, then go through switching with the chord. So it'd be one.

And. And two.

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

Up. And even. See, even I was thinking too much and I had a slight hesitation in. In the transition. So if you're not used to switching between strumming patterns, this is a great song to work on that for. Now, if you were a big fan of ccr, I do have some other fun songs by this band. You can go check out my CCR song playlist right over there and see if there's another classic that you would like to play right now.