A how-to guitar lesson video by Lauren Bateman teaching The Beatles’ song “Oh Darling.” The lesson explains the song’s 6/8 timing and simple all-down-eighth-note strumming (accenting beats 1 and 4 optionally), walks through the intro (E7), verse and chorus chord progressions (including A, E, F#m, D, Bm, A7, D, F, B7, E/E7), and demonstrates simple non-bar alternatives for F#m and Bm. It highlights a key change into the chorus, describes the second-pass A→A7 transition, and notes an optional closing tag (Bb → A7) for a definitive ending.
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Hey, guitar enthusiast Lauren Bateman here. In this lesson video, we're gonna be doing oh Darling by the Beatles. So let's check it out.
So this is a really cool song by the Beatles. It's in 6, 8 time. So we're gonna be doing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3, 4th, 5, 6. 1, two, three, four, five, six. So that is going to be the timing of what we're doing here. And we're going to be throwing in an F sharp minor chord. So you might want to know that as a bar chord. If not, I'll tell you what you can do to fix that. We also have a B minor bar chord and we also have a couple seven chords. So it's a great song in doing a variety of different chords. So let's talk about how we're going to go about playing this, how we're going to do the strumming and all that. Let's start, start with our intro. So the intro is really, really simple. It's an E7 chord.
Which is basically if you know E major, just lift up your third finger.
Oh darling.
And that's literally how the song starts. That's all there is to the intro. So let's get into the verse. So once we hit Darling, that's going to be the start of our verse which we're going to hit on an A chord.
All right, so we've got oh darling.
So we're just gonna hold that E7 and then start on the A. So the chord progression is.
Somewhat repetitive in terms of the. So we have double A, double E. Also before I finish this, if you need to get the chord chart, go to my website, laurenbatement.com in the song sections I have all the chord charts. You can go print it out and come back here. So again the verse we have double A, double E, double F sharp minor, double D. All right. And then we have B minor, E major, B minor, E major, a, d, a, e7. That's a lot of chords. Fortunately they do repeat a lot of that. It's just the ending changes on the second time through. So again I said this song is going to be in 6, 8. So how we're going to approach this is we're just going to do all down strums, all right. And it's going to be sound like eighth notes. Except we're only going to be doing six down strums versus eight. That's why it's six, eight. So there's six beats and they sound like eighth notes.
All right, so that is the strumming. It's all eighth notes. If you want to accent the 1 and the 4, you can do that to make things sound a little bit more like a rhythm.
All right, and at the end here we're going to get into where we get that ADA part. We going to get into a slightly different rhythm and how we're going to play this. So let's talk about that specifically. So at the end of this, it's kind of like a tie in to, to the intro again. So we've got.
Believe me when I tell you I'll never do you no harm.
So we.
Got D, A and then we're back to E7.
So we're going to strum that E7 again and we're going to hold it. It's a very tense moment before we get back onto O darling and we repeat the whole thing through again. Now the second time through on these verses, instead of holding the E7, we have we go from A to A7. So the second time through the line goes.
Believe me when I beg you don't ever leave alone D to A and then A seven.
And going to A to A seven is a very easy transition. You just lift up your middle finger. So very, very, very simple. All right, so that brings us into the chorus. So let's talk about what we're going to do in the chorus real quick. For those of you guys who aren't familiar with bar chords, if you want to do F sharp minor, you can just play an A chord on the bottom three strings. That's a simple fix. And for B minor.
Instead of playing the bar chord, you can just use fingers 1, 2, 3 on the bottom three strings and strum the bottom three strings. Those will work. So we have an A major chord on the bottom three strings for F sharp minor and then fingers 1, 2 and 3 at a diagonal 3, the B minor. Those are some simple fixes for your bar chords. Hey guys, if you're liking this video so far, don't forget to give me a thumbs up. I'd really appreciate it because YouTube will show my videos to more people just like you. So the chorus, we actually the Beatles do an interesting thing. We change keys here and essentially, if you don't know what a key is it's. It's a family of chords that sound good together. But there's going to be a sharp contrast between the verse and the chorus in terms of the sound sound. And that usually indicates some kind of key change. And that's why at the end of the verse we went from A to A7. Because it makes this transition a little bit less abrupt, even though it's still kind of abrupt. But there's a big change that happens in the chorus. So now we're going to play D chords. We're starting on the D chord. We have an F major chord that's going to show up. You can play an F major 7 instead of the F if you don't know the bar chords, which is basically. It looks like a B minor, three fingers on the diagonal. So you could play that instead. But we have a D chord, double D, double F. Then we have a. That a seven again, double Ds, double F. So basically every chord is twice. At the very end we have B7.
And a F. Then we have E major and then E7. So let me just play through that chorus real quick. I won't do too much singing so that I don't get hit with copyright infringement. So we got D.
When you told me. So back to D. We have the F now to B7.
F. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6. Alright, so we got E on the.
N and then O darling.
So that E7 hold keeps coming in. It's kind of a theme. So once we get through the chorus, it's fairly repetitive after that. There's just one little tag that you might want to throw on the ending of this song, which is a B flat to an A7. So we've got the very ending.
So you'll hear that at the very ending of the song. It's this B flat which is a bar chord. Sorry, and then an A7. But you will hear hear that distinct tag at the very end of this song because the song does have a definite ending. And if you don't want to do that, just, just don't worry about the B flat. Just go from A.
Just end on the A7. But it has a much nicer resolution. It sounds like the song is really ending when we do that.
But again, if you can't do that, don't worry about it. Leave it out for now. Maybe it's something that you can work on. So that's oh Darling by the Beatles. I love the Beatles. Make sure to like and comment on this video and don't forget to subscribe to the channel so that you'll see when I put out new content. YouTube's gonna throw a couple more videos up over here. The guitar playing cat and I hope that we'll see you in another lesson video.
