Play Your First 2 Guitar Songs in Only 30 Minutes!

One of my biggest pet peeves is when guitar teachers refuse to simplify things for their students to make them easier to play so that you can have fun faster on the guitar. So what I'm going to do for you in this video, I want to show you how just learning a few simple chords and a simple strumming pattern, I can actually get you playing two songs. Real songs. We're not talking about Mary Had a Little Lamb here. I'm going to play two real songs with you by just learning a few simple, simple things on the guitar. I firmly believe that anyone that wants to learn to play this instrument can. If you have the right blueprint and you take the right steps. So the first thing we're going to jump into is how to hold your guitar. Now, if you know how to hold your guitar and tune your guitar, feel free to jump over these first couple steps. But if you don't, we're going to go over that right now.

So you can see I have an acoustic guitar, but it's basically the same thing whether you have an acoustic or an electric. I highly recommend that if you have a guitar strap, put it on the guitar. So this way, the strap is really what's going to hold the guitar up. This way, you don't have to use any extra muscles to hold your guitar. Now, I'm going to show you a couple different ways to do this. You can see with my acoustic, I tend to like to have my acoustic stick sitting on my strumming hand leg. Okay. So if you are a righty, this would be your right thigh. If you're a lefty, this would be your left thigh. And you can see I just have my guitar hanging here. And I've got my foot up on kind of like a little bit of a tripod on my stool. So my strumming foot is elevated. Again, if you're a righty, that would be your right foot. If you're a lefty, that would be your left foot. Some of my students like to just cross their leg over. So you'll see when I do this. So the fretboard is pointing upwards. We always want the fretboard to be pointing upwards. We don't want it flat, and we definitely do not want it to point down. Why? Because it'll put a lot more strain on your wrist. Okay. We're going to take some of the tension off your wrist by pointing this guitar neck up. Now, when I play electric, I will oftentimes play in what's called classical position, which is where you take this butt end of your guitar, and you put it right between your legs. Now, for acoustic, I find it a little bit weird, but it. For a lot of people, this is still comfortable, but you can see what happens with the neck of the guitar goes way up. And this is the most ergonomically correct position to play the guitar. It's the best position for your wrist. Okay. You can see my wrist here. My elbow is away from my body. My wrist has a nice straight plane to it. We don't want our wrist to be bending like this, and this. The. That will cause a lot of strain and pressure. So for a lot of my older learners, since I specialize in working with adults, you know, kind of ages 50 plus, this tends to be a really, really good position for them because some of them have arthritis and other things, and it takes a lot of pressure off the wrist. Okay. But I wanted to show you both ways you can do this both with acoustic and electric. So this is called the classical position. And it's just that butt end goes right in between both your legs. The way I like to play the guitar is I like to play it a little bit off to my side, because when I perform, this is kind of how perform. And I like my sitting position to mirror my standing position as much as possible. So for me, this is comfortable, and this is how I play my acoustic. Now, before we tune our guitar and getting it sounding great, I just want to talk briefly about fretting the guitar. So fretting the guitar is when you actually press the strings to play a note. And there is a great way to do it, and there is a worse way to do it. So with the guitar, we have these little metal lines, and those are called frets, okay? And each one of these boxes is a fret, and they're numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Now, your guitar will probably have some dots on the top signifying the odd numbers. So mine has a dot at 3, 5, 7, 9, and then a double dot at 12. So we kind of use those as guidelines. But what I want you to do is just want you to take your index finger on your fretting hand. Okay? So if you're a lefty, this would be your right hand. If you're righty, this is going to be your left hand. And I just want you to put your first finger on this first string, the bottom string. And then we're going to just press lightly on that first fret. Now, you can notice my hand here. The finger is towards the front of the fret. Okay, so I'm pressing the fret and I'm going to use the same amount of pressure and I'm going to move towards the back of the fret. Now listen.

I'm only halfway back in the fret and already my string is starting to buzz. Now watch when I go to the back of the fret. Now I've got a completely muted string. So it just goes to show you.

You need less pressure to play in the front of the fret versus the back of the fret. Now we're playing with the tips of our fingers here, okay? We're playing with our fingertips. You're not playing with the pad of the finger, right? So you're going to have to curl those knuckles. And in the beginning this is going to be tricky because you don't have the finger dexterity quite yet. That's perfectly fine. Don't worry, you will get there as you continue to play the guitar. But all we're going to do is put your first finger, first fret on that bottom string to the front of the metal and just use your thumb and pick down. Okay? So that's how we're going to get these notes to sound. Okay. And you can just kind of slowly work your way up the guitar.

Getting those sounds to come up. Alright? So that's how you make your guitar make sound. But if we're gonna learn songs, we have to make sure that our guitar is always in tune. Because if the guitar sounds bad, it doesn't matter how good of a guitar player you are, the guitar is always gonna sound bad. So we gotta get it in tune first. So let's grab a tuner. So I like these snarks. I'll put a link in the description below. They're just a little clip on tuner and it goes on your headstock. And this is called the headstock here. And all it does is it picks up the vibration of the guitar and it's going to tell you what note you're playing. Now each of these strings has a name. Just like my name's Lauren. Each of these strings have their own name. So the thick string on the top, that's the sixth string. It's going to be E. Below that is A. Below that is D. Below that is G. Below that is B. Below that is E. Okay, so once again we've got E. A, D, G, B, E. So that's Eddie Ate Dynamite. Goodbye Eddie. That's kind of an acronym that's very popular. Eddie Ate Dynamite. Goodbye Eddie. That's how you can Remember how to tune your guitar? And when we put this tuner on the neck, it's gonna light up with a letter and there's gonna be a little bit of this LED screen with a needle. And, and the needle is going to move left and right. And the goal is to try and get the needle right in the middle. So you want the letter on the screen and you want that needle in the middle. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in for a little bit of a close up with my snark tuner for you so that you can see me put my guitar in tune. But before we do that, I have to get it out of tune. So I'm going to turn these tuning pegs. This is what we're going to use to tune the guitar. So I'm just going to turn, turn a couple of these a little bit in the wrong way. So now when I play a chord it sounds horrible. So let's go in for a close up so that we can make the guitar sound good again. Alright. So you see my snark tuner here and you can see it's lighting up because it's picking up the vibrations here. So I'm playing the bottom string, which I said was E. And you can see there's the little needle in the middle. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get it in the middle where it lights up green. Okay. This was my second string, B. You can see my guitar's a little bit out of tune, but not too bad on these bottom strings. These are the ones I didn't play with, but I just wanted to show you what they look like. Then we have G. Now this is going to be the first string that's going to be out of tune. So this is supposed to be D. And I'm actually going to put it even more out of tune. And the reason why is because.

I want to get to this point. So you can see this is a C sharp. So in music we have sharps and flats. So it looks like a little tic tac toe. When you tune your guitar, you want to make sure there are no tic tac toes and no little Bs. Okay. So when I go to D, I want to make sure. So I'm going to slowly turn my tuning peg. You can see I'm going very slowly and I'm kind of hitting the string as I go to tune this back up. Oh, and there it is right in the middle now if I go too far, I'm just going to go too far. Oh no, now I got D sharp. I don't want D sharp because that's going to be out of tune. It just has to be the letter by itself. Okay, so we're going to roll it back here to D. There we go. Now this string's back in tune. Alright, this is another one that I turned out and it's supposed to be A and it's kind of sitting close to A sharp. So I'm going to lower this one. You can see that little LED coming down. I'm not yanking it. I'm just going very slowly. And I keep hitting the strings so it picks up the vibrations. And now I'm dead in the middle. Okay, let's check out this next one. Alright, so this one says D and I need it to be E. So I got to go through D. I got to go through D sharp. I really put this one out and I got to come up to E.

Okay, there we go. And I'm going to just make sure it's right in that green. Sometimes it's hard on some strings to get it, but as good as you can.

There we go. If I play the chord right, it should sound good. Okay, so that is the basics of how to use your tuner. So what I would recommend doing is exactly what I did. Put your guitar slightly out of tune, bring it back in tune. Put it slightly out of tune, bring it back in tune so that you get used to putting the guitar in tune. Because again, like I said, if the guitar is out of tune, it doesn't matter if you're the best player in the world. The guitar is going to sound like crap and you're not going to want to play it. So we want to make sure the guitar is in tune. And we always want to tune to Eddie 8 Dynamite. Goodbye Eddie. No sharps, no flats, so no tic tac toes and no little Bs. But now that we've gone through all of the stuff for the absolute beginners, we're going to jump in to learning our first chord which we're going to need for both of the songs. I'm going to teach you in this lesson. So the first chord I'm going to show you is called an E major minor chord. I'm going to show you the way I like to play it and I'm going to give you some other options. Now this is a full chord. It is a real chord. Now, so far in this video, I have not Used a pick. And I'm not going to because I don't want to get into explaining that yet. But I do have videos on how to use a pick that you can check out. All we're going to do today is we're just going to use our thumb and strum down. Ok? That's all I want you to do. Now what we're going to do with the E minor chord is we're going to be using our first finger and we're going to be using our second finger. Now this over here is called a chord diagram. And each one of those strings relates to a string on the guitar. Okay, so we have the E string, the A string, the D string, the G string, the B string and the E string. All right? Now at the top, when you see a circle, it means we're going to play that string. Now in some of these you're going to see an X and it means we're going to not play the string. And then you're going to see some numbers inside, black circles. Those represent the fingers 1, 2, 3 and 4. Okay, we're going to only be using our first and second fingers for these lessons and these songs. We're going to keep it super simple because my goal is to show you that you can do this. Okay? Because you can. Now let's start off E minor, first finger, second fret. So we're going to count up. First fret, second fret, first finger is going to go on the A string and then right below that you're going to shove your second finger in. Now the difficulty is one finger is going to end up further back, so you might have to press a little bit harder with that. But if you strum, you should get a nice chord. Now, Laurem, where's my thumb? My thumb is on the back of the guitar, straight up and down like this. Okay? We don't use the thumb that much to play chords. I can play chords without my thumb. You can see it floating around back here. But for you in the beginning, you're probably going to want to rest the thumb right on the back. You probably are going to over squeeze in the beginning because you're just learning. That's okay. It will get better with time. Okay, so this is position one. Okay, so we've got first finger on the A string, second fret. And then we have the second finger right below it on the D string, second fret. And you're going to strum all six strings. Okay? Now if this is difficult for you, you could use your Second and third fingers. I prefer this first and second because one of the chords I'm going to show you, it's going to make it easier to go in and out. But try it both ways and find whichever way is comfortable. But if you can do it with the first and second, I would recommend doing it that and I'm going to show you later why. Okay, now some of you, because I get this all the time, Lauren, I've got the biggest sausage fingers in the world. Some of you are going to be able to play this with one finger and that's totally fine. You can do that. There's nothing against that. Some of you, you're like, my strings are muting and it sounds horrible. Don't worry about fixing the muting strings right now. Sometimes that's going to happen. You're learning. It's absolutely fine, I promise. These are things that are going to work themselves out with time. Right now we're just focusing on the mechanics of playing. Okay, have fun. First, we'll perfect everything later, don't you worry. All right, so let's do that one more time. So we're going to take the first finger, a string, second fret, second finger right below it. And then just strum down, get all those strings. Okay.

Perfect. All right, so we've got our first chord and now we're going to learn our first first strum. Okay? And this is how you learn to play music. You learn chords, you put a strumming pattern behind it and then you play in time with the music. So we're going to take our E minor chord and we're going to do a very, very simple strumming pattern. We're just going to do four down strums. Okay? And we're going to count 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay? So let's get our E minor back in place. First finger on the A string, second fret. Second finger right below it on the D string, second fret. And we're just going to strum down with our thumb. Alright? And if you have a pick, you can strum down with a pick. Totally fine. I'm just using my thumb for simplicity sake here. And we're going to go one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. 1, 2, 3. On your own.

Good. And don't forget to breathe. Okay?

1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Okay, hopefully that wasn't too bad. If you need to pause the video and just practice that simple strumming pattern, it's a very, very good foundation. And don't be afraid to Count out loud in the beginning. I always tell students who have trouble with strumming, sometimes they can't do it with the guitar. And I say, don't play with the guitar. Just count first. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. Then bring it over to the guitar. Okay? 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. I always tell students, because I'm a singer, I say, if you can sing something or you can say something in time, you can usually play it in time. So don't feel like you always have to start by playing the guitar. Start by counting, then bring the playing in. Now, with songwriting, we usually don't just have one chord. To play a song, we need at least two. So I'm going to show you a second chord which is going to help us play our first song. That's right. We're already getting ready to jump into our first song. So we're going to start with that E minor chord. All right? So let's get that set up again. Okay. First finger, second finger. Now, this next chord is called a D69 chord. Now, don't you know, I have a lot of students who get tripped up on this. We're really only using this for this song. So again, if the chord doesn't sound perfect, don't worry about it. It's all about the mechanics right now. So we're going to take the first finger, move it up one string, and we're going to take the second finger and move it down one string. Okay? That's why I taught you the E minor first. So we got this D69 chord, which has, like, this really kind of ethereal, open feel to it. So if we go back to E minor, first finger down, second finger up. C minor. Okay, first finger up, second finger down. That's D69. First finger down, second finger up. We have E minor. Okay, so what I want you to do, we're just going to practice going between those two chords. We're just going to strum once and switch. Okay? So it's going to be E minor. Move your fingers. D69. Back to E minor.

And back to D69.

Back to E minor.

D6, 9.

Two more times. E minor. D6, 9. Last time. E minor and D69. Okay, so right now, your fingers. I kind of move my fingers in a way that your fingers are probably moving, which is one at a time right now, eventually, you're going to be able to move these fingers at the same time or relatively close to the same time. But for now, if you have to move them one at a time, that's okay. So what we're going to do is we're going to take that count we just had, but we're only going to strum once. We're only going to strum on the one, okay? So we're just going to go one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Because you just learned these chords, so I want to give you enough time to switch in between. Okay, so here we go. I'm going to count 1, 2, 3, 4, and you're going to switch on the one count. All right? Now, you don't have to hold the chord. You can get ready and perched and wait for that one. Okay, so Here we go. 1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3, four. 1, 2, 3, Four. 1, 2, 3, FOUR. 1, 2.

On your own. And.

Again.

And 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3.

One more time.

1, 2, 3, four. One, two.

And on E minor.

All right, so some of you might be saying, sounds a little familiar, especially if you're one of my older adults. Like I said, most of my students are in their probably 60s, 70s, and 80s at this point. If you don't know who I am, my name is Lauren Bateman, and I specialize in helping older adults learn how to finally have fun on the guitar by making things simple, just like we're doing here, and eventually building up and making things more difficult. But I believe you have to start simple first. All right? And have fun. That's the biggest thing. Have fun with the guitar. So, all right, we've just done those two chords. So what song are we playing? So what we're going to do is we're going to play Horse with no Name by America. Okay? And depending on how fast your chord changes are, some of you are going to pick this up quicker than others, and that's perfectly fine. Go at your own speed. So either you're going to play one strum per chord like we just did, or you're going to do the four strums.

Eventually, we want to get up to the four strums, but if that's too fast for you right now, don't worry. Okay? Just do the one strum per chord, or maybe you're only going to do two strums per chord.

Find whatever works for you. Don't play to my level. Play to your level. All right, so we're just going to work on playing through a little chord progression. Okay? And I'm not going to sing because sometimes we get hit with copyright. But I will hum and see if that works. Okay, so we're going to start off with our intro. Okay, so we got one, two. And we're just going to do a little verse. Okay, so 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4.

On the first part.

There were sand hills rings.

Here's the chorus. Ready?

Super cool, super cool. And I do have a full play along for that song. I'll put a link up here if you guys want to go and practice with that. But that's it. That's your first song. See? See how easy it is to play the guitar? And I do the easy because you know, learning the guitar is not easy. It definitely takes time. But I just want to show you by simplifying a few things, we can learn songs very quickly actually, which means we need to learn another chord. So I can teach you a second song because that was the promise I made to you in this video. All right, so we know our E minor chord. Hopefully you know it really well now because you've played a song with it. And we're going to learn an easy version of a C chord, alright? Everyone yells at. This is like the guitar teacher's pet peeve. They always yell at me like, that's not a C chord, that's cheating. Listen, I'd rather cheat and help you have fun than make it super, super hard for you. You get frustrated and you give up. And it's not cheating. It actually is a C chord. It's just not a full C chord. Okay? It's a miniature C chord. Alright, so we have the E minor chord, okay? Hopefully you're very familiar with that now because we've done a whole song with it. And this is why I said use the first and second fingers, okay? There's a reason. So I'm gonna lift up the first finger, I'm going to leave the second finger in place and I'm going to put this first finger.

On this B string, okay? Now this is a C chord. It is not the full three fingered C chord because so many people have difficulty moving one finger. Moving two or three fingers at the same time is. Is very difficult. So all I want you to do, we're just going to work on moving a single finger, okay? So we have E minor. And then you're going to see my second finger is going to kind of slide up in the fret. And then the first finger is going to go to the B string first fret and that's going to be our C chord, okay? So we have E minor C. Okay? And on that C chord, we are just strumming the bottom four strings, okay? Remember, those X's mean do not play the string. Okay? You can see how easy it is to make this chord change versus doing that full C chord. Okay? For me, I've been playing guitar for a long time, so it looks easier. But trust me, I have so many students who appreciate the fact that I do the easy C chord. Okay? The goal, like I said, is to get you having fun first. Okay? We want to have fun. I can always make things super hard for you down the road, but right now, just get used to the mechanics. Okay? First fingers just moving back and forth. E minor and C. Okay, Just do that a few more times with me.

E minor C, E minor C. Okay, so now we have our second chord, the C chord. So let's just try that with some strumming here. Okay? We're going to go just like we did before. One strum E minor, one strum C on a four count. So we got one, two, three, four.

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

1. Here's four strums.

1, 2, 3,4. 1, 2, 3, four. 1, 2, three, four. 1, two, three, four, four. 1, 2,3, 4. 1, 2,3,4. 1, 2, three, 4. 1, 2, 3.

And on E minor.

Now. Great, you've got these two chords. So what can we do with that? We can play a Beatles song called Eleanor Rigby. Now, the downside to Eleanor Rigby is it doesn't have a consistent chord progression, meaning we're not just going to be going between E minor C, E minor C. But what we're going to do is we're going to play the chorus on this. And I do have the chord chart on my website. You guys can go follow along with that. If I misspoke, this is actually the intro. So we're going to do a double intro here. So we're just going to do double C, double E minor, double C, double E minor, and we'll repeat it again. So we got 1, 2, 1, 2. Here we go.

Let's do it again. Ready?

The one thing I hope I've proved to you today is that you can learn to play guitar. Okay? Just got to take things simple in the beginning. It's okay to cheat on the guitar. We're not cheating. We are learning. We're taking things making them a little bit easier for the beginner level so that you can actually learn to play songs. You learn two songs in just a single lesson. Okay? Imagine what you could do if you had a good blueprint to keep going. Alright, so if you want, I do have a free crash course that goes into a little bit more. We're going to learn a fourth chord which will open up thousands of songs for you. I'll put a link in the description below if you want to go check out that free crash course. But I really want to emphasize that you can do this. Don't let a guitar teacher tell you that you're not capable of doing this. Maybe because you can't play as good as they can or you're going to sleep slow. That's totally fine. I always tell my students, this is your guitar journey. Go at your speed, no one else's speed. I've been playing the guitar almost 20 years now. I'm going to go a lot faster than you. You just started. My guitar is going to sound a lot better because I know how to, you know, the little intricacies of making the guitar sound good. Don't worry about any of that right now. It's all about the mechanics in the beginning. And remember to have fun. If it's not fun, you're not want to get a. You're not going to want to practice. You're going to throw the guitar back in the closet and then you're never going to do it. And this is your dream. Don't let anyone tell you that your dream is not possible. I firmly believe that anyone can learn to play the guitar if they dream hard enough and want it hard enough and put in the work. There's people without hands who play the guitar. I can't help you do that. I don't have a method for helping you play the guitar with your feet, but I do have a method for helping you learn to play the guitar, especially if you're an older learner. Like I said, most of my students are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. And this is what we do. We go slow, we simplify things, we take it step by step, we build upon what we already know and we just try to apply it to songs as quickly as possible. Okay? We're not here to throw a bunch of music theory at you and confuse you and make it hard for you. The goal is just to make the guitar make sense so that you can have fun. So that a family member can come in from the other room and say, hey, were you just playing Horse with no Name? And you're gonna say, yes, someone finally recognized what I was playing on the guitar. And that, my friend, is the goal. So if you're looking to take your guitar to the next level, go check out my free Crash Course. It comes with a PDF workbook that you can download. And while we do go a little bit further, I show you some finger dexterity exercises, because that's super important. Got to get these hands moving. So go check that out, and I'll hope to see you in a lesson video real soon.