Lauren Bateman presents a short beginner guitar lesson for Bob Marley’s "Three Little Birds." The song uses only three chords (A, D, E); she demonstrates three strumming patterns (simple 4-downs, 4-downs with an up, and an all-up/reggae-style pattern with muted downstrokes), explains the song structure (intro of four measures of A, chorus pattern: A A D A A D A, verses add E: A E D A), and plays short examples using the second strumming pattern.
Chapters
Hey, guitar enthusiast Lauren Bateman here. And in this lesson video, we're going to be doing a song by Bob Marley called Three Little Birds. Let's get into it.
Now, this is a great song because it only uses three simple chords. The A chord, the D chord, and the E chord. And we're just going to be using those over and over and over again. And this does have somewhat of a repetitive chord progression, so we'll go over that as well. And if you need the chords and the lyrics, feel free to go to my website. I'll put a link in the description below. You can pull that up and watch this video at the same time. Now, I'm going to show you a few different strumming patterns that you can use for this song before we get into actually playing with it. So the first is this most simple way to do it. Let's start with an A chord. Okay, so we have our A major chord, an easy way. Four downs.
That is the easiest way to go about playing this song. Another charming pattern you could use, if you want to spice it up a.
Little bit, is just to go 1, 2, 3, 4. And 1, 2, 3, 4.
And so that's four downs with an up at the end.
1, 2, 3, 4. Up, down, down, down.
So those are kind of like the two simplest ways. The third option I'm going to give you for some people who want this to have more of like a. Like a reggae feel, is just to do all up strums on the. And so it's a little bit more trickier, not really beginner level.
So we have 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
And you can hear on the down strum, I am strumming down, but I'm actually resting my palm on the strings, so I actually mute the string so it gives it a very sharp strum here. Up. See, So I would just practice that up and then strumming down. But when you strum down, just kind of like karate chop your strings.
Gives it more of the feel of the song. But again, it's probably not absolute beginner because the timing is on the up strums, which can be difficult for beginners. So try one of the first two strums first. And then if you want to get intricate with it, you can try just the up strum. So the intro for this song is just an A chord. We're doing four measures of A. So just pick whichever strumming pattern you want. It's pretty simple. The song actually Starts with our chorus. So the chorus has one chord progression which is very simple. It's just two chords, A and D. So we have double A, D, A double A, D, A. So I'm going to try that second strumming pattern, the 1, 2, 3, 4, and. And show you how that sounds.
We got 1, 2, 3, 4,. And 1, 2, 3, 4. And D.
And A.
And then again.
A.
And A.
All right, and that's all you're doing on these choruses. Double A, D, A double A, D, A. So let's talk about what we're going to do on the verses. Hope you guys are enjoying this video so far. If you haven't subscribed to the channel yet, make sure to do so. Turn your notifications on this way. YouTube tells you when I release more videos just like this one. So in the verses we add in our E major chord. So the chord progression is going to change a little bit. So it'll be an A, an E, a D and an A. And then it just repeats that again. A, E, D and A. And if you guys want to do a play along through with me of this song beginning to end, we'll put a lesson. A link to the lesson video up there where you can do the play along with me. This is just the lesson where you learn how to play the song. So I'm going to play through the verse again using that second strumming pattern. 1, 2, 3, 4. And all right, from the top of the verse, we got rise up in.
The 1, 2, 3, and the e.
To the D.
And then back to A.
Down A, A.
To E.
D.
To.
And then right into the chorus. Don't worry.
And to D does every little thing.
And then you would just repeat that chorus progression. So this song goes to another verse and then there is a flower final chorus and we just end the whole song by strumming on A. Hope you guys like this lesson video. Make sure to give me a thumbs up so that YouTube shows this video to more users just like you. YouTube's gonna pop up a couple more videos over there. Go check one of those out and I'll see you guys in another lesson video.
