I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) Guitar Tutorial and Pro Tips!

Hey, guitar enthusiasts. I'm super excited. We're gonna get really percussive with this song. This is by the Proclaimers. This brings me back to when I was a kid, and this is just such a phenomenal song. Now, I want to warn you, there are some bar chords, but I'm gonna show you some workarounds because we're gonna be doing a lot of muted kind of strumming with this.

Okay. We're gonna be doing a lot of muted strums. Or we can mute with our fretting.

Gonna be doing a lot of percussive strum. But if you notice, my strumming has a very dark tone to it, which means I'm not strumming the full. I'm not trying to emphasize these treble notes. So we could use power chords instead. So let's talk about the regular chords and what we can play as power chords instead. E major is perfectly fine. You can use that. You don't need a power chord for that. A major, you also don't need a power chord for that. You can just play the top half of the A chord. Makes it nice and easy. For the B chord.

You might not want to play a double bar. It's a very, very hard chord to play for some people. You can get away with the B power chord, which is second fret, fourth fret, fourth fret. And I'm on strings A, D, and G.

Will work just fine. Okay. Might get one extra string out of that B chord because again, we're really not playing that high E string. The next one is C sharp minor.

So.

So if you took this B power chord and you just slid it up two frets, you'd have a C sharp power chord. Okay. And you can use that as your power chord versus the C minor chord. If you don't or can't play full bar chords yet. Last one is F sharp minor. Okay. But again, you could do a power chord on frets 2, 4, 4.

We'll work great for this song. So you can hear I'm getting percussive, and I just listened to the intro one more time. I thought. I'm like, I think they're muting with this hand, but I hear. I almost hear like, they might be palm muting.

Okay. So you can play around with it however you want. I kind of still like it with the fretting hand because I feel like I can have a little bit more fun with it. But I'm going to show you both ways, and you can decide which option you like. Best now, for palm muting, we're going to use the palm of our right hand, or, sorry, the palm of our strumming hand. This way, if you're a lefty, it would be your left hand. Righty would be your right hand, but your strumming hand. And we're going to use that palm, and we're going to put it, boom, right here in front of the bridge of the guitar. Now, for some of you, you might be like, it doesn't sound so great. It might sound shallow. What you want to do is, I usually tell people, start over the sound hole or just around the sound hole and back it up towards the bridge of the guit.

Hear that meatiness coming through when you get that meat?

Almost sounds like Melissa Etheridge. Now, I have a lesson on that one. I'll put a link up there. But again, up here, it's too shallow. So just slowly.

Once you get that chunk, it's going to sound great, especially on this song. So the strumming pattern that I'm kind of hearing as we go through the intro and understand when you play this and you sing this, you might play a slightly different strumming pattern. I'm going to play what I think I hear, and then we'll do a little demonstration. So we've got 1, 2, 3, 4. And that's the first part of the strumming pattern on this intro. We're just playing an E chord for right now.

So it's down, down, down, down, down. Okay. Because we're palm muted, we're just going to use all downs. Down, down, down, down, down. Also helps us really focus on getting those lower notes.

Okay, so that's the first half of the pattern. The second half is going to be one and two and three, four.

Okay. One and two and three, four.

1 and 2 and 3, 4.

Okay, so if we put that together, it's going to be one, two, three, four. And one and two and three, four. One, two, three, four. And 1 and 2 and 3, 4. All downs. Ready? 1, 2. Here we go.

Okay, so that's option one. I like that. But the way I really think if I were going to play this live, I would do it this way. All right, so I'm going to show you how to mute with your fretting hand instead of the palm hand. Because some people, they find that if you've never done palm muting before, it can be pretty difficult. But this is another percussive way to strum your guitar. So watch and hear the difference.

Get a little bit More pop out of my guitar. Okay. The palm muting is a lot warmer and it has like a duller tone, whereas I get the brightness of the guitar. So I much prefer to do it this way. I think when I listen to the recording, they were palm muting, but this is how I would do it. And what I'm doing is when I'm playing the chord, I'm strumming it, and then I'm immediately letting go of the pressure on the chord to mute the strings. And again, like I said, I'm only playing the top three or four strings. So if I do that, I'm gonna. I'm gonna get rid of the rest of the rest of the chord. All right, so it sounds like this.

1, 2, 3, 4.

And 1 and 2 and 3.

I really like that. So again, one, two. Ready?

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

So what I'm doing is one, two, three.

I'm muting the chord and then four and one and two. And I'm just letting it ring. And then I'm muting on three, four. Okay, so it's 1, 2, 3, 4.

And 1 and 2 and 3, 4.

Okay. And I'm also using my thumb a little bit on this top string to mute that. All right, so a little bit of left hand muting technique. So those are two options for how you want to play this. And then once we get into the verses, most of the chords are just going to be four down strums, which makes it much easier to sing. You could add some of the little embellishments, some eighth notes in to give it a little bit of flavor. And then when we get to the chorus, I have a couple little strumming patterns written here because I was hearing a couple different things. But first, let's talk about our verse and our verse progression. So we have two measures of E.

And then we have a half measure of a half measure of B. And then back to E.

And then it repeats the whole thing over again. So that is our verse progression. So it'll start like this.

When I wake up Where I know.

I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the.

Man who wakes up next to you When I go out there I know.

I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the.

Man who goes along with you if I get drunk yeah, I know I'm.

Gonna be I'm gonna be the man.

Who gets drunk yes, you, you and I have there I know I'm gonna.

Be I'm gonna be the man that's.

Happening with you But I would walk.

And that's where we get to the. The fun part. So for the chorus, I have two different strumming patterns written down here. I have 1 and 2, 3, 4. And.

That, like, totally sounds like. I bet if you just played that, everyone would be like, Proclaimers. Proclaimers. It really defines the song, I think. All right, so what am I doing here? I'm doing one and two, three, four. And. All right. And I'm muting on two and three.

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

And.

Okay, so it's giving me that jump, that percussiveness, which I really like. And for the chorus, that's how. Because the chorus really, really opens up. So that's one. The other is one and two, three and four.

All downs.

One and two, three and four.

All right, so I'm muting on two and four on this.

Okay. And the chord progression here, there's no split measures. So in the verse, we had A and B splitting measured. They're all full measures. It's two. Two measures of E, two measures of. Sorry. One measure A, one measure B. Two E's, one A, one B. Now, it could be where on the E chords you do one strumming pattern.

Gotta switch over to that B chord. But you can hear how you could kind of switch around with these two strumming patterns. I think the majority of it's going to be pattern one. Now, if I were going to sing over this, I don't know what I would play. If I were going to sing, my hand just might start doing whatever it wants rhythmically, because I'm paying attention to the voice side of it. So I'm going to take this through a verse and a chorus and an intro. But don't worry, we still have to talk about that. C sharp minor, F sharp minor. We haven't heard from them yet, but I'll show you where those are in a second. Let's take it from the top. Play whatever rhythm comes to your mind. Okay? Don't worry about sticking to something. The goal is just to play something. One, two, here we go.

When I wake up yeah, I know.

I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the.

Man who wakes up next to you When I go out there I know.

I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the.

Man who goes around with you and if I get drunk yeah, I know.

I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the.

Man who gets drunk next to you and if I have her yeah, I.

Know I'm gonna be I'm gonna be.

The man who's having it with you But I would walk 500 miles and.

I would walk that under Just to free up man.

All right, so you can see it's just such a fun song to play. This would be really fun if you were the guitar player and you had a singer with you. Super, super fun. All right, so let's scroll ahead here to one of these verses, because there's just a hold that comes in. So this would be verse three. And we get at the end, it's like, I'm gonna be the man that comes back home with you all right.

So I'm gonna be the man who comes back home with you I'm gonna.

Be the man who's coming home to.

You.

Okay, so what happens here? We're going from our half measure of A and the half measure of B.

To full measure of C sharp minor.

Okay? And then we're doing a half measure strum of F sharp minor in hold and then B hold. So each one of those is two beats. So we have two beats, B, two beats, C sharp minor, four beats.

Then we have a hold for two beats, and then a B hold for two beats. Coming home to you.

Okay, and then we wrap up with our chorus and the whole fun part, which is the.

And you see, you can have a lot of fun doing different strumming stuff on this song. Super, super fun song. I really, really hope that you enjoyed this. This lesson. If you want another really, really great song for strumming, go check out my wonder wall lesson right there. Super awesome song. Simple chords, really, really great strumming. Make you sound like a really good guitar player. Go check that out right over there.