Operator Guitar Lesson by Jim Croce - Easier Strum Version

In this Operator guitar lesson by Jim Croce, I'm going to be showing you how to strum along to the song. So we won't be doing any finger style here, but let's start off with the five chords we're going to be using throughout this song. And they are a G chord. Okay. And you can do that G chord with either the third finger or the pinky on the bottom, whichever you prefer. We have a nice A minor chord and then we have some interesting chords. The next one is going to be this G B chord. Not sure if you're familiar with that. It's very popular chord. Think of songs like Landslide, Dust in the Wind. Very popular chord. I'm coming from a C chord, so I'm probably going to be using these two fingers, the second finger and the pinky. Okay. We also have the C chord. We have the D chord. We have an E minor chord. And then we do have a B minor bar chord. Okay. That does come in here every once in a while. And in this really funky D, F sharp chord. Okay, so a little bit of a funky chord there. What do we do? I like to play that F sharp note. It's a D chord with an F sharp note on the top. I like to do it with my thumb. And at this stage, you know, this isn't an absolute beginner song. You probably have a little bit more flexibility in your hands to do that. The other option is to do the second, third, and fourth fingers on the bottom for the D chord and have that first finger get up the top to get that note. I like doing it this way. Works for me. Seems very easy for me. So choose whichever one you like. We're going to get into how to strum along to the song.

So I'm going to show you a basic strumming pattern here. Again, Jim's doing a lot of intricate finger style stuff. And if I do a finger style lesson for this song, I'll put it up there and you guys can go check that out. The strumming pattern we're going to be using is an eighth note strumming pattern. It's a very, very common pattern, but we're going to add a little bit of a spice into it. Let's get the timing first. So let's take our G chord. It's going to be 1, 2, and. And 4. And. Okay, so that's going to be down, down, up, up, down, up. Now, a lot of people, this is a syncopated rhythm. And what that means is we're Missing a down strum somewhere. And that down strum is missing under the third beat. Even though that third beat's not there. Don't let it trip you up. You are still strumming down. I call it like a ghost strum. You're. You're still strumming down on that third beat. 1, 2 and 3 and 4 and 1, 2 and. Okay, so my hand's not stopping and going. So it happens. A lot of people, they stop up here. Ooh. And then they get a rush. They got a rush to get that hand back down. Still strum down on the three. You're just not hitting any of the strings. So it's 1, 2 and, and 4.

So the little spice I'm going to add to this is since this is a little bit more of a finger picking song and you know, it's not all about strumming, we want to let that bass note ring out. What does that mean? Let me play the intro for you so that you can hear what it's going to sound like.

All right. So you can hear how I'm letting. And I did make a mistake in there. I missed one of the bass notes on one of the chords. That's okay. I'm not perfect either. So you can see I'm hitting the bass note, which is just the lowest note of the string. So for the G chord, that would be the sixth string. For chords like B minor, C, A minor, five string chords, that's going to be the fifth string. And then A chord like D or D7, that would be my first fourth string. Alright, so we're going to let those ring out. I'm still doing the same strumming pattern. One, two and, and four. And it's just instead of strumming fully on the one.

Just kind of targeting the one bass note. Or if you hit a couple of the bass notes, that still works too. Okay, so don't. If you, if you're not good at really focusing in yet on bass notes, just get one or two of the bass notes and let them ring out and it'll sound great. Now you saw in the end of this intro, there's a walk down. There's lots of different walkdowns Jim does throughout the song. And he's kind of using chords like this. He's kind of doing like a blackbird type thing. But we're just gonna, we're just gonna use single notes. Okay. We're doing the easier version of this song. So before someone who's a purist out there yells at Me and says, that's not the way Jim does it. I understand. It's the easier version. It's the easier version of the song, and we're just trying to have fun with it. All right, if you guys don't know me, but my name is Lauren Bateman, and I love helping guitar students take really complicated songs like this. Make them a little bit easier and fun for you to play. And I really specialize in helping older beginners, which is why I love doing songs by, like, you know, the Eagles, the Beatles, Jim Croce, all that fun stuff. So we're starting on the C note, which is the third fret on the A string. Second fret on the A string, which is a B note. And then we're playing an A note. So on that fifth string, that A string, we're going to three, two, open. Okay? That is C, B, A. And then we're catching the F sharp note on the second fret of the top string. So it's going to be.

Okay. And the timing of that is one, and, and, and. And then we come back into our G chord on the next part of the intro. So one more time it's going to be.

Bum, bum, bum, bum.

Okay, so if we throw that into the intro now we've got 1, 2, ready M.

And that G there is going to take us into the next section of the song, which is the verse. Now we're going to encounter this walk down. Again, the timing is going to be a little bit different. So it starts off pretty much the same. We've got a G chord, a B minor chord. Instead of A minor, we now have a C chord, but we have the same walk down. Except we're ending on the G note this time. So it's going to be C, B, A, and then we end on G. So this is a very common walk down. Think of a song like Heart of Gold.

Okay? And the timing is now different, too. So it's going to be one and two. And I would strum a G chord on that. And so it's going to be first three notes exactly the same. C, B, A, G. And then we're going to do Up, Down, Up. So we're going to get the second half of that strum still in there. Up, down, up. It's going to sound like this.

Okay, one more time.

And very common to, like I said, Heart of Gold.

And you would do that on Heart of Gold, too. So very, very common walk down that you'll see in a lot of songs. And then the next Line of the verse, we've got an A minor that D slash, F sharp, the E minor chord and a D chord and then we're going to repeat the whole thing. So let's go through this first verse together and you can use the settings cog to slow me down I will take it from the intro. We'll go intro and verse and then we're going to talk about what's going to happen on the chorus because there's a lot more changes that take place on the chorus.

One, two.

Ready, M.

Operator, could you help me place this call?

See the number on the matchbook is on fading.

She'S living in LA.

With.

My best old ex friend Ray.

A.

Guy she said you knew well and sometimes Hayden.

All right, now we're jumping into the chorus section of the song where we get some split measures. There's no walk downs that we're going to be throwing in here, but there are a lot of split measures. So we're going to be keeping the strumming pattern for the most part the same. We have a few chords. For example, the first one we run into is a C and D chord and they're splitting a measure. That means we're going to give two beats to a C chord and two beats to a D chord. Up until this point, we've given all the chords a full measure which would be four beats. So what we're going to do on those is we're just going to do a down, down, up and a down, down, up. Okay. So it's going to be 1, 2, and on the C chord and then 3, 4, and on the D chord or the second chord. So that would sound like this.

Again.

So that's what we're going to be doing on this chorus section. And there's a section of this where we have a lot of split measures. All right, so you're going to be changing chords very quickly. We're going to be going.

Okay, so there's four measures of split chords all the way through. So you're going to be going from this strumming pattern.

So you're going to be going from one strumming pattern into a slightly different strumming pattern. So you might want to practice going in and out of those two before jumping onto this chorus section. And before I go through and play through this, I'm going to put a note on the end. There's a C chord where we're just going to strum and hold. Okay, we're going to strum and hold and then we have an interlude which is us basically going back to the intro section of the song. So let's take a look at this chorus and see what it's going to sound like. 1, 2, ready, M isn't that the.

Way they say it goes? Let's forget all that Give me the number you can find it so I can call Just to tell them I'm finding To show.

I've overcome the blow.

And learn to take it well I.

Only wish my words could just convince.

Myself that it just wasn't real and that's not the way it feels I.

Would strum and hold I did a strum and mute but works both the same. But he. He strums and holds it at that point. Now, in this chorus there, this is where the drums come in. So if you wanted to get percussive with the strumming, you definitely could do that at this point. Or if you want to keep it the same and do exactly the playthrough that I did just now, that'll work perfectly fine. No one's going to yell at you. I know I won't. So if you're interested in learning some percussive strumming that you might want to put towards a Jim Croce song, then check out my Leroy Brown guitar lesson video right over there, where I'm going to show you how to do that step by step.