HOW TO PLAY - Rockin In The Free World Guitar Lesson by Neil Young

Hey, guitar enthusiasts. Lauren Bateman here. And we're going to be doing a song by Neil Young called Rockin in the Free World. Let's get started.

So I had a request from one of my students in my guitar course. I was like, lauren, can you please do an electric guitar song? So I said, sure. So, Sergio, this one is for you. Now, I've printed out the chord chart here. If you guys need to follow along, you can go to my website, laurenbateman.com I have the lyrics and the chords on the website. So you can go pull that up and follow me here. Now, because we're on the electric versus the acoustic, we're going to be playing things a little bit different. I'm going to be using a little bit of palm muting in this song. Now, if you're a beginner and you can't do the palm muting, don't worry about it. Just use the regular rhythm for the song. The chords we're going to be using are pretty easy. It's going to be E minor, G, D and C. So let's get into the song. So let's talk about the strumming that we're going to be using. And we're going to be using a different strumming pattern for the verse versus the chorus. And the verse actually has two distinct strumming patterns. So we're going to go over that first. Let's start off with our intro. And we're going to be starting off with this E minor chord. Okay. And I've got just a little bit of. Just a little bit of distortion on the guitar to fuzz it up a little since we're on electric and we're just going to be using eighth note strumming.

One and two and three and four. And one and two and three and four. And one and two and three and four and.

And you'll notice again, because I'm playing electric, I'm not strumming the whole chord. I'm actually just strumming kind of the top three strings of. It's. It's almost like playing an E power chord is what we're doing. So we're starting with E minor. Okay. And the T timing on this intro in the first part of this verse is a little bit different. So if you're familiar with syncopation, give it a try. If not, if you're a beginner, just stick with the straight eighth note strumming. So the second measure of this intro is D and C splitting a measure. So E minor. We have A full measure of E minor. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and nothing there. The change comes when we get to the D and the C. We're going to be strumming one and two and so we're going to change to a C on the. And so it's going to be three strums of D.1 and 2 and. All right. And then C. So.

All right.

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

All right. So you can hear that change. And you heard there. I went to palm muting. I'll put a link to a video up here on palm muting if you guys want to learn more about doing this technique. But it sounds really good on this song because it's nice and chunky. But I'm just doing that eighth note pattern. So it's E minor.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

And 1 and 2 and. All right, we switch to the C on the. And let's do it again.

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

One and two and Three and four and one.

All right. And if you're listening, I always recommend people listen to the video first and then go back and play again. You'll hear I'm accenting the D and the C, the E minor. I'm palm muting the whole thing.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

And D. That first note, that first strum, I'm lifting the palm, muting away.

Same on the C.

Can you hear that? So it's pretty cool. That's why this is a little bit more intermediate on the strumming side of things. But again, if you're a beginner, just split the measure in half.

One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four.

And it'll work. It's not going to be perfect for the recording, but it will work. So the second part of the verse, we're just going to go to straight eighth notes. Okay. There's no syncopation anymore. It's just straight eighth notes. So we go from going 1 and.

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

And then it goes.

He goes right back to un syncopated.

And that's the second half of the verse. So we lose those syncopations. When we get to, there's a warning sign on the road ahead. Okay, so it goes from being syncopated to being straight 8th notes all the way. So let me play a little bit of this for you guys. Hey, guys, I hope you're enjoying this lesson video so far. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Turn those notifications on this way. You know, when I release more lessons just like this one. All right, so I usually get copyright things for singing, so I'll try and hum. Sometimes I don't get hit with copyright, but I want to go through the first verse here before we get into the chorus because things are going to change. Again for the chorus, so we got.

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

Last one.

Now, no syncopation.

Which leads us into our chorus. All right, so here we are with the chorus, and the chorus has some real cool syncopations. Again, if you're a beginner, all I want you to do is hold the chords and strum. Forget about the syncopation. So if you're an absolute beginner, how I would play this chorus is I would just strum a G chord, I would strum a D chord. I would strum a C chord and strum the C chord again. So you're just gonna strum and hold. That's the cool thing about this chorus. We got Keep on rocking in the free world.

Again.

All right, so that's the easy version. Now, the syncoveda version is going to sound like this. It's the same except for that very last measure. Okay, so we have a G chord, strum and hold. Keep on rocking. D chord, C chord. Now the very last measure, this is where the syncopation comes in. It's going to be one and on the C1 and. And then the next and after two is going to be an E minor. So it's going to be 1 and.

And 1 and 2 and 1 and 2 and. And then on the very end of.

The measure, we're going to hit the and on the four and it's going to go and four right back into the G. So again, it'll be that very last measure, 1 and 2 and.

3 and 4 and 1.

Okay, again, here it is.

One and two and three and four and one.

So if I do the whole course, it's going to be one, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four. 1, 2, 3, 4.

1 and and, and.

Okay, do you hear that one more time?

So we got 1, 2, 3, 4.

I think I counted that right. Let me do it one more time. I want to make sure I'm counting this right for you guys.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, Four. One, two, three, 4.

One and two and three and four.

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

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1.

See, sometimes I have to go and count things too. I can do a lot of stuff off of feel now, but sometimes when you're explaining things, you have to go back in and really count to make sure you're doing it right. So that is the feel of the course. So let's go through and play through on this chorus now. 1, 2.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Real quick, before we wrap up the last part of this lesson, if you guys are liking this video, make sure to give it a thumbs up as it helps YouTube show more of my videos to viewers just like you. So after our first chorus, what happens is we go into an interlude where we introduce an A chord. Now it's basically be an A power chord. Or you could just play like a little a bar chord or you can play the open chord, whichever works for you. But you're just gonna hold this in strum. I don't hear a lot of strumming, so I would just go one, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four. 1, 2, 3, 4. One, 2, 3, 4.

And then it goes right back into the intro.

All right. And then once we go through the intro, we go right back into another verse, another chorus, another interlude, and then I think there's a final verse in chorus. But those are all of the sections of the song for Neil Young's Rocking in the Free World. Again, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Don't forget to give me a thumbs up and leave me a comment below if you liked it. YouTube is going to pop up a couple more videos over there. Hopefully there'll be something else that will interest you. Maybe another Neil Young song. I don't know. Go check them out. And I hope to see you guys in another lesson video.