How To Play Margaritaville Guitar Lesson

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this tutorial. I had someone who requested that I do Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, so I am going to do that in this tutorial. I like this song. It's a great song. It's fairly easy for beginners to play. What I'm going to do in the first part of the video is I'm going to go through the chord chart, which you can find on my website, laurenbateman.com I'm going to go through the chord chart and the progression first for the verse and the chorus of this song. And then at the end of the video, I'm going to go through the intro section that you just heard me play with for this song. So let's get started with the first part of this verse. So the great thing about this song is that in this verse, you get to hold these chords for a very, very long time. So there's not a lot of chord changes, which makes this a really, really great song for beginners because you can focus on the strumming instead of having to change all these chords. Once we get to the chorus, we're going to be changing the chords a bit more. So the first chord we're going to start with is a D chord, just a regular D major chord. Very nice. And there's a few different strumming patterns you could do depending on your skill level. The one I'm going to play.

In this tutorial is a little bit of a syncopated pattern. It's going to be 1, 2, and. What is it?

1, 2, and. And 4. Down, down, up, up.

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

Now, if that syncopation is too much for you and you really want to have a downbeat on that third count, you can do that. We can do 1, 2 and 3, 4.

Down.

Yeah.

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

1.

Either one of those will work perfectly fine for this song. It just depends on your skill level. So if the syncopated rhythm I'm doing is going to be a little bit too much, just do that.

1, 2 and 3, 4. Down, down, up, down, down.

But the one I'm going to be.

Using is down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, down, down, down, up, up, down, down, down, up, up, down.

You heard me accidentally say another extra up in there. You can add that up in if you want, but I'm going to be using the strumming pattern with not the extra up on the end. So let's go through this chord chart, we've got the D chord.

We're playing it six times in a row. So you're going to play that strumming pattern six times. How fantastic is that?

So we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

All right. And then that gets us to the word oil. And when we get to the word covered with oil, we're going to change to an A major chord.

So all of those.

Tourists covered in oil.

So that's the key word. You're listening. So if you don't want to count out six measures, listen for the word oil. That's when the A chord changes over. Now this A chord we get to stay on for eight measures. So that is completely fantastic.

So we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

And then boil is the next word where we're going to change chords and we're going to go back to the D chord.

And we're just going to play that once. Now, the next chord after that is D7. If you don't know a D7 chord, you can just play two D chords in a row. But if you want it to sound like the song, we're going to play one measure of D major.

Followed by one measure of D6,7.

So that would be boiled.

Which then leads us into the chorus section. So that is the kind of the verse section of the song. So it's a D chord for six measures, it's an A chord for eight measures, it's a D chord for one measure, and it's a D7 chord for one measure. Again, if you don't know the D7 chord, don't worry about it too much. Just play two D chords and that is your verse, and that's how it repeats for the rest of the song. So let's go on to the chorus part. Wasting away again in Margaritaville. We've got a lot more chord changes in this section of the song. So we're going to start with a G and we're going to keep the same strumming pattern. So it's going to be a G chord followed by an A major chord followed by D, then D7. All right, and we're going to repeat that twice. So it's going to go G.

To A.

To D.

To D7 and then repeat G.

To A.

To D.

And D7.

So that is the first half of the chorus. The second part, we start on G again. So it's going to be G.

Again to A.

Again to D. But this time we're just going to play one Strum and then back to A. So if I sing it with the.

Words, Some people claim that there's a woman.

So all those chords line up with the lyrics. People talk about how do you sing and play guitar? You line up the chords with the lyrics. On a song like this, it's very easy to do. So that D chord is under W.

W and then the A chord is on Man, Man.

And then the next G chord comes on. Blame, Blame. So let me go through that again. So we get G for one measure, A for one measure, and then we.

Got D A back to G.

So it's got some people claim that there's a woman.

To blame.

So we have a full measure of G followed by two measures of A.

And then two measures of D.

And then we're back to the beginning. So what I'm doing, I'm going to play through a verse and a chorus and then I'll show you guys the intro after that. So let's start from the beginning. So we got six measures of D, eight measures of A, followed by a D and a D seven followed by the chorus. So let's see how it's going to sound. So we got 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4.

Nibbling out sponge cake.

Watching the sun.

Bai.

All of the stories covered in oil there's the switch to the 8th.

Strumming my six strings.

On my front porch swing.

Smell those shrimp, they're beginning to boil 67 course here we go Wasting away again Another ring you.

Searching for my long sacred souls.

Some people claim that there's a woman to blame But I know.

It'S nobody's fault.

And then that's it. You pick up right back from the beginning going through the verse and the chorus. So in the next section of this video I'm going to show you that cool little intro that you can play for this song. Alright guys, welcome back. In this section we're going to talk about the intro, which is basically a bunch of little like double stops. It's two notes played together at the same time. So we're going to mostly be using our first finger, third finger, first, first, second, first, second and third. I can't even talk this morning. So first finger, second finger, third finger. And we're almost going to be playing somewhat like reversed power chord shapes, if you know what that is. So I'll show you two ways to play this. One kind of the normal way, one a slightly easier way if you find playing two notes at the same time difficult. So let's start with the first one. So we're going to start. I'm going to come a little bit closer here. Roll my. My seat up. So we're going to start with the first finger on the fifth fret of the high E string. And our third finger is going to stretch to the seventh fret on the B string.

So we have fifth fret on the first string, seventh fret on the B string. And we're going to play that together three times.

So that's 1, 2, 3.

Now we're going to slide this whole shape back to the third and fifth fret.

So it's five and seven three times.

Slide back to three and five once, and then back up to five and seven.

That's the first part. So it's five and seven.

Slide down first finger to the third fret, third finger to the fifth fret.

And then right back.

And you're going to do that twice in a row. So we got.

So that's the first part. Now what we're going to do for the kind of the ending is we're going to slide the first finger up from the fifth fret to the seventh. We're going to use our second finger on the eighth fret of the B string.

So we got seven and eight. And you're going to play that three times.

And then we're going to head back down to five and seven.

Then three and five, and then a D chord.

All right, so the whole thing. Let me go through that again. So we got five and seven three times.

Then three and five.

And then back up to five and seven. And then we're going to repeat that.

Now up to 7 and 8, 5 and 7, 3 and 5 and then D.

Now, if that's too difficult for you, what you can do is just play everything on the high E string. So you can just play five on.

The high E. 5, 5, 5, 3, 5, 5, 5, 5, 3,. 5, 7, 7, 5, 3, 2.

So let's do that again. Just single notes.

5, 5, 5, three, 5, 5, 5, five, three, five. Now up to 7, 7, 7, 7, 5, three, two.

Play that a little out of rhythm so it would sound like this.

All right, guys. There you go. That is the full Margaritaville tutorial. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Like the video. If you're looking for more information, you can go to my website, laurenbateman.com I do have a guitar course there. If you're looking for more strumming advice or looking to get your playing a little bit better and sounding a little cooler with these songs, feel free to check that out. Laurenbateman.com thanks, guys so much and I'll see you in the next video.