Lauren Bateman teaches Puff the Magic Dragon on guitar with capo on the 2nd fret, using G, Bm, C, Em, D, and A shapes. She covers two strumming patterns, including a syncopated approach and a swaying rhythm, then breaks down a fingerpicking pattern where the thumb alternates between the 3rd and 2nd strings.
Pup the Magic Dragon is a great song to learn on the guitar. It's a lot of fun, but it has a very specific rhythm that trips people up. So if you want to sound like Peter Palermieri on the record, let's get into the lesson.
The first thing I want to make mention of, if you watch Peter, Paul and Mary live, they do have a capo on their guitar at the second fret. And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be playing all of our chords relative to the capo. That means this capo now is acting like the nut of our guitar. So we would play Our G chord 3 frets up to make our G chord from the capo. So before we get into the finger picking section, what I'm going to do is we're going to go over the chords and we're going to learn a couple strumming patterns to help us get this timing down before we jump into the finger picking. So the chords we're using for this song are going to be a G chord, a B minor chord, a C chord, an E minor chord, a D chord, and an A chord. Now, I know a B minor chord is a bar chord. For some of you, that might not be the easiest thing to do. I would recommend using the full B minor chord for the finger picking. But if you're just going to strum the song, you can use the easy B minor chord and it'll work just fine. If you want to work on strumming only, the first rhythm we're going to go over is a non stop syncopated rhythm just so we can get the foundation of our timing. It's gonna be 1, 2, 3 and 4. And I'm gonna play it on a G chord. It's gonna sound like this 1, 2, 3 and 4. And down, down, down, up, down, up.
So if I were gonna play the first four chords of this song.
So you can hear it, it kind of has the essence of the song, but it doesn't really sound like the record. There's. There's a little bit of a different timing that's going on here, and that's what makes this song super fun. So we're going to be working on a syncopated rhythm that has a little bit more of a sway to it. You're almost going to feel like you can glide with the music. So the strumming pattern we're going to use is very common. It's a down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, down, up. So that's 1, 2, and, and 4m. 1, 2, and, and four and. But we're going to kind of hop this rhythm so it has a sway feel to it. So that upstrom, that first up strum, is going to come a little bit quicker. Let's see if you can hear the difference here. So we've got.
See, I feel like my body can sway along with the rhythm versus the. If you did it straight on the time like we did with the first rhythm, it would sound like this. This is straight time.
Versus suede. Ready?
Could you hear the difference? Could you hear how the feeling, the strumming changed? And if you didn't hear that, go back and listen to this a couple times. Back and forth and hear that. How that timing just changes just a slight little bit. So now if I went and played those four chords again, this is what the song would sound like to begin with.
So there's one more thing, strumming wise, that I want you guys to be aware of. That's very important from a timing perspective. So is we have some measures where there's two chords in a measure, meaning each chord is two beats. So what do we do? We're going to split that strumming and we're just going to do down, down, up. Okay. Down, down, up for each chord. It'll sound like this.
So you can still hear that hop. So that was the last line of the verse. I. I'll start from the full C chord, but listen to it again. I still have that hop even though I'm doing down, down, up, down, down, up, down, down, up, down, down, up here.
So you can still see I'm maintaining that sway feel even though I'm just doing the down, down, up for those split measures. So. So you can see this is starting to sound a lot more like the energy and the feel of the record. But what we're going to do now is we're going to learn how to finger pick this song with that timing. So we're going to get rid of our picks and we're just going to be using our fingers.
So there's that same exact timing. So let's talk about how we're going to finger pick each one of these chords. So we have our six finger. Our six string chords. Like a G chord. In the E minor chord. We would play it this way. It's going to be thumb, thumb, one playing strings six, five, four. Okay. So the thumb is going to alternate and play these bass notes. Okay. The first finger owns the third string. The second finger Owns the second string. Okay. For most of the chords, except for the D chord, we're gonna have to do something a little different on that one. But I'll show you in a little bit how we're gonna do that. So back to the G chord. We've got thumb, thumb, one, thumb, thumb one, thumb, thumb one. Now the second half of the pattern, we're gonna start with the second finger. So it's gonna be the second finger on the second string. Then thumb, then first finger. So it's second string, sixth string, and then third string.
So that's what it's going to sound like for our G chord. Now, our five string chords, like our B minor chord and our C chord, the first and second figure don't move. They're doing the same thing. Third string, second string. Now you're going to be playing the bass note as the fifth string. So it's going to be fifth string, fourth string, with the thumb, first finger, thumb, thumb, one. Now second finger on the second string. Back up to the fifth string with the thumb and then first finger on the second string. So very similar to what we just did, Just the thumbs playing different strings. Instead of playing six, okay, six and four, we're playing five and four.
So we're going to shift the whole hand down now for this D chord. And the thumb is going to be alternating between the third and fourth. Okay. Those are the bass notes. The first finger owns the second string. The second finger owns the bottom first string. So it's going to be thumb, thumb, one on strings 4, 4, 3, 2. And then we have second finger on the bottom string, Then thumb on the top fourth string and then second finger. So all together, the D chord's going to sound like this.
Now, just like the strumming, we're going to have some split measures. And what do we do on those split measures? We're just going to use the first half of the chord. So if we talk about that last line of the verse and chorus, again, we have a full C chord. So you would pick that regular. And all of the split measures, you're just going to do the thumb, thumb one. So G, it would be thumb, thumb one. E minor, thumb, thumb one. A thumb, thumb one, D, thumb, thumb one, G, thumb, thumb one, then back to D. And again, we're always trying to maintain that hopped rhythm. So this is what that last line would sound like starting from the C chord.
A wonderful thing about Puff the Magic Dragon is that once you learn a verse or chorus, you've learned the entire song. Because the chord progression is so repetitive. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to play through once on one of the choruses so that you guys can practice playing along with me. And if you need to slow things down, you can use the settings cog down there. One to ready? And Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea and frolicked in the autumn mist and a land called Hanley.
Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Haunalee.
If you you guys love finger picking and you want to learn one of the most common finger picking patterns that you can play over tons and tons of songs, then I have an amazing video over there where I teach you step by step how to play through a Travis picking pattern. Go click on that video and I'll see you guys in the next lesson.
