Lauren Bateman teaches the Rolling Stones' Paint It Black without a capo, using Em, B7, G, D, and A7. Keep your 2nd finger between Em and B7 as a pivot point. The intro lick runs 5-7-8 on the B string, then 5 on the high E, back to 8-7-5, with the second half 5-4-5-7-5-4.
I see a red door and I wanna paint it black.
No colors anymore I want to turn them black hey.
Guitar enthusiasts, in this lesson we're gonna be going over the strumming pattern for Paint It Back by the Rolling Stones. But I'm also gonna be showing you step by step how to play that little intro lick that Keith Richards is playing throughout the song as well. So let's get into.
So this lesson, we're not going to be using a capo. Sometimes Keith does use a capo, sometimes he doesn't. So we're going to be using the non capo version. So the chords we're going to be playing are an E minor chord, a B7 chord. We're also going to be using a G major chord, a D major chord, and an A7 chord. Now, in this lesson, I would recommend starting off the song with your E minor chord using the second and third fingers. The reason is this creates a pivot point between the B7 chord chord. So when you go from e minor to B7, you'll notice that my second finger doesn't even really have to move at all. You just keep it there and it creates a really nice pivot point. So if you guys know me, I love pivot points on chords. Anything we can do to make these chord changes easier. Now, before I get into the little intro lick that comes throughout the song, let's talk about the strumming pattern. The strumming pattern is going to be a simple eighth note pattern. We're going to be doing all down strums. And if I play an E minor chord, it's going to sound like this 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4and.
Okay, so all downs.
Now if you guys heard in the intro, I did a little extra spin spice over this and I did some palm muting. Now you can surely play this song without it. You could just play the E minor.
And go e minor to B7 very easily. Or you could do the palm muted version, which I'm going to show you right here. So I'm going to play an E minor chord and it's going to be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, then B7.
And if you can see I'm doing this by just placing my palm right in front of the bridge.
You can hear it kind of warm up.
And that's how we find our palm muting sounds.
We've got I see a red door and I wanna paint it black.
No colors anymore. I want to turn them black.
So that is the first part of the verse. You can do that pa, muted or open, whichever is your preference. But we're going to take the next part of the song. Everything's going to open up here. So we've got some split measures coming in. So this next section, we're going to go from an E minor chord to a D major. Then we're going to go from a G major to a D. And all of those chords are splitting a measure. And what I would recommend for the strumming pattern here is to just go down, down, down, up, switch to the next chord.
Down, down, up.
Switch to the next chord. Down, down, up. Then D. Down, down, up. So all that together would be.
Okay. One more time.
And then at the end, we have two E minors on this first time through. So it's. You can either go back to open eighth notes or palm muted, whichever you prefer.
1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. And then we're going to go through that whole thing again with a different ending. Then it's going to be E minor, D to G to D. Here comes A seven, A seven.
B seven.
And I would do those as eighth notes. I just played them as quarter notes so that we could go through the chord progression. So if I take this verse from the top all the way through, it's going to sound like this.
I see a red door and I want to paint it black.
No colors anymore I want to paint them black.
I see the girls walk by Dressed in their summer cloth.
I have to turn my head till the darkness go.
And then you would start right back into that E minor chord. So that's a great thing about this song because once you learn one verse, you just basically repeat that all the way out. So let me show you, step by step, a way to play along with the little lead guitar riff that keeps coming in throughout the song. So if you probably notice, the cool thing about this lick is that most of it is on one string. There's one note that's going to go on the bottom, high E string. So we're actually going to start at the fifth fret on your guitar on the B string. Okay, so that's our starting note, and we're going to play 5, 7, 8. Now, if you notice my fingers, it's almost like each finger gets its own fret. So five, six, seven, eight. If you guys are familiar with my spider exercise. Okay, that'll be very helpful. So we're going to go 5, 7, 8. And then we're going to bring the first finger down to the high E string. Five. Okay, so we've got five, seven, eight, five. And then we're going to come backwards back to the B string. 8, 7, 5. Okay, so all we've done 5, 7, 8 on the B string, 5 on the high E string, and then backwards. 8, 7, 5. Okay, that's the first half of the lick.
The second half of the lick, we're going to play that fifth fret again. We're going to come back one fret to the fourth fret on the B string, back up to the fifth fret.
Seventh fret.
Fifth fret, and then press down into that fret. Good, because we're going to slide from 5 to 4. Okay. You can always just pick it. You can go 5, 4. I like to slide.
So the second half of the lick is 5, 4, 5, 7, 5, 4. If we play this all the way from the beginning, very slowly at first, it's going to sound like this. One, two, ready? And.
And then you would just repeat that again.
And now a little bit more up to speed.
If you guys really enjoyed this simple lead guitar lick. I have a whole playlist over here, finger dexterity exercises that are all based on cool league guitar licks like Crazy Train, Lean Ami, Dazed and Confused by Led Zeppelin. So click on that playlist over there to learn more fun licks.
