A YouTube guitar lesson by Lauren Bateman teaching Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now.” The lesson covers the chord progression (D, G, A, C, optional Fmaj7 in place of F), three strumming patterns (a syncopated verse pattern, a simplified pattern for singing, and a louder chorus pattern), and guidance for the bridge/instrumental that includes bar chords (C# minor, Dm, B, etc.). The instructor emphasizes beginner-friendly substitutions and techniques for players over 50.
Chapters
Hey, guitar enthusiast. Lauren Baben here, and I'm going to show you a great song by Johnny Nash called I Can See Clearly Now. Okay, great song. Mostly open chords. There is an instrumental section that does use some bar chords, but you'll be able to play the majority of this song with just open chords using a D chord, a G chord, an A chord, a C chord. And instead of the F chord, you can just use an F major 7. All right, so those are your open chords. Now, I did say on the instrumental verse, you'll see a C sharp minor bar chord, and you're also going to see a D minor bar chord. Right. If you don't know those yet, don't worry. Just play along with the track. Don't play that section and keep going.
All right, so I'm going to show you three different strumming patterns. I'm going to tell you what I hear and also going to tell you. Tell you what I would do if I were gonna sing this song and make it a little bit easier to sing and play at the same time, because that's something my students ask me all the time. Okay. This is a great song to sing and play. So I hear the song. We've got our verse, which is, you.
Know, I can see clearly now the rain is gone.
Okay, so each of these chords is one measure or four beats. So what I kind of hear is.
It's kind of the rhythm I hear underneath the song. At least in the verse section. We're doing something different in the chorus, but I hear in the verse that rhythm. And what that is is it's a syncopated rhythm. Okay, so. Which can be difficult to do, the timing. But I always tell people, sing it out.
So this is down, up, up, down, down, up, up, down, down, up, up, down, down, up, up, down.
Okay, so I'm going down, up. And I'm kind of muting the strings with my hand here. I don't know if you can see my palm resting on the strings.
So it's down, up, up, down. Okay.
Okay. So I'm even on that down. I'm kind of muting the strings.
Okay.
Can you hear that muting? So I'm kind of cutting the chord short. Okay, so if you want to know what the rhythm is, it's the 1, the end, after 2, the and after 3, and then the 4.
Now that's great. And that's really what I hear in the background. Now, for some of you, that might be tricky to sing and play at the same time. So what I would recommend to do on the verses is just do a.
All right, so you can hear on that chorus, there is a dynamic change. If you listen to the recording, you're going to hear, like, this total musical change that happens when we transition into this chorus on the C and G chord. So what am I doing there? So we have this great strumming pattern.
1, 2, and M. 4, and 1, 2, and, and 4.
And so we have that great strumming pattern, but then something musically changes. So I change the strumming pattern to.
1, 2, 3, and 4. And 1, 2, 3, and four. M. So it's down, down, down, up, down, up, down, down, down, up, down.
Now, if you have not practiced a lot with transitioning from one strumming pattern to another, this would be a great time to do it. And the first way to do it is just to practice the two strumming patterns one right after the other. Don't worry about the chord changes yet, because that's going to take more brain power, and we need as much bandwidth to just focus on the strumming pattern. So I'm just going to stay on a D chord.
Okay, and then once I got the feel for that, I would go a little bit faster. I would say, okay, let me try and get this now up to speed with the song. Go a little bit faster.
Once I get those drumming patterns up to speed, then I would go back and add in the chord changes. So we're going from a D chord to a C chord. So we go 1, 2.
Then once I could do that, then I would put it back into musical context. And that's what we're going to do now because we're going to play through the verse and the chorus section of the song, and then we're going to talk about the bridge. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Lauren Bateman. I specialize in helping beginners learn to play the guitar, particularly those over the age of 50. That is my specialty. And we have so much fun playing songs just like this one by Johnny Nash. So let's take it from the top here. Okay, so we're going to be working on 1, 2, 3, 4.
Just get that strumming pattern in your dance first.
Down, down, up, up, down, down. Here we go. Ready?
I can see clearly now the RA.
Now.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Gone out.
Happy flight Here.
Comes the change it's going to be.
A bright.
Bright, bright sunshiny day.
It'S.
Going to be a bright, bright sunshine.
Okay, so let's take a look at this bridge and instrumental section now. We're going to use that same strumming pattern, that second pattern, the 1, 2, 3, and 4 on the bridge here. And we've got an F chord to a C. But again, if you use F major 7 makes a really nice, easy transition into a C chord. So if you use this F major 7, you just remove the pinky, move the second finger up, you got a C chord. Okay, so we get two Fs, two Cs, two Fs, two As. Then we go into the instrumental section, which is a C sharp minor to G. If you play the right chord to G. See, I still make mistakes. I've been playing the guitar for decades. C sharp minor G. And then we have a C chord, a B chord, and a double A. Okay, so a lot going on in that little instrumental. If you cannot play the bar chords, just play the chords you can play. And you can always work on adding the bar chords in later. You also could just play the bottom four strings of those chords. So this would be C sharp minor, and this would be B minor. That eliminates the bar. Doesn't sound as nice as a full bar chord. But those are options for you if you want to try. Let's take it from the bridge.
So we got one, two.
Here we go.
Look all around there's something about blue sky.
Look straight, something.
So you just jump right back into to the verse. And at the end, you have our outro, which is just going to be.
If you liked all the strumming patterns in this and the different dynamics, I highly recommend you go check out my expressive rhythm and strumming course where we really focus on. On learning how to become a better rhythm guitar player. Expand our strumming outside of just like kind of the two or three common strumming patterns that you keep using over and over again. One of them is this down, down, up, up, down, up pattern. Students ask me all the time Lauren how do I get out of the habit of just doing this? One or two strumming patterns that I know how to do? And you have to learn more strumming patterns. You have to force yourself to learn other songs. And that's what we do in expressive rhythm and strumming. So take you out of your comfort zone, teach you lots of different strumming patterns, how to get percussive with the guitar. So if you're interested, go to the link in the description below. Go check that out, and I hope to see you in another lesson video real soon.
