Strum Along & Have FUN with THIS Sweet Baby James Guitar Lesson

Hey, guitar enthusiasts have amazing James Taylor song. We're going to be doing Sweet Baby James, which has a lot of chords. Unfortunately, it does have some bar chords. So this song is going to be a little bit more late beginner, early intermediate. If you're looking for an easier James Taylor song, then I recommend my Fire and Rain lesson right up there. Now, this is an absolutely beautiful song, but it uses a lot of different chords, so I want to go over those to make sure you know what we're using in this song. So I see it looks like nine different chords here, and a couple of those are bar chords. So first, let's start with the open chords. We've got an A major chord. Okay. Followed by a seven. And the easy way to go from A to a seven is you lift up your middle finger. This is where I tell students. I'm like, you get to tell me how you really feel. You get to flip me the bird, and it's perfectly fine. Okay? So that's one way to do it. You could also do it with your second and third fingers. Okay. If you find that more comfortable. But I can fit all three of my fingers in that second fret for that A chord. So I like doing it this way. Very easy transition. Then we go from G chord, standard G chord, D chord. We have E minor 7, which is an E minor chord with a pinky on the third fret of the B string. Okay. We then have D, E major 7, which you guessed from E minor 7 is an E major chord with our pinky on the third fret of the B string as well. Okay? So E minor, E7, E major, E7. Also, I'll show you a little cheat way. You can play E7 if you don't want to use your pinky. You can play an E major chord and just lift up your third finger. Also, an E7 chord is just not as bright and twangy as the one with the pinky. And then we do have a D sharp slash. F. Sorry, a D chord with an F sharp. Totally said that wrong. My coffee hasn't kicked in yet. So we have a D chord on the bottom. And I like to use my thumb to play the bass note. Some people. My classical guitar teacher really wanted me to play it this way with my second finger, third finger, pinky on the B string at the third fret and then the first finger up here. I'm lazy. I don't particularly like that. And I'm not a classical guitar player, so I like to break the rules. So I Like to use my thumb, because I can do that and it's comfortable for me. So those are two options on that chord. And then we finally. We have A B minor, and we have F sharp minor. Okay. And we're using the bar chords because we're going to be doing a couple different strumming patterns I'm going to show you for this song. So. And one of them is going to have us targeting the bass notes, which is why using these full bar chords can be helpful. Now, if you're someone who still has trouble with the barre chords, we are going from F sharp minor into B minor. So you could just sit here and practice going between those two chords back and forth. Okay. And also later, the big one is B minor to G. And that's what I tell students. Just practice going back and forth between the two chords. And go nice and slow. Get those fingers to move, and we can smooth out those transitions between the bar chords.

So this song is in three, four time. That means we're going to be counting to three.

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

It has a waltz feel to it. Okay. And we're going to start off with the intro, which is just four chords. It's G, D, F sharp, E minor, 7, and A. So it'll sound like this. This is going to be the strumming pattern I'm going to show you first.

Okay.

So it's 1, 2 and 3 and 1, 2 and 3 and 1- 2 and 3 and 1, 2, and 3 and.

And he might even hold that. He might hold that A. I think that's what he does. So it's.

There is a young cowboy who lives on the.

So what are we doing there? You see, I'm using down, down, up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up. Very, very common strumming pattern for three, four times. So if I just play that G chord, it's going to be down, down, up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up.

Kind of swaying into the next ch. So if I take the first line of the verse, we have D, A, G, F sharp minor twice. It's going to be 1, 2, and.

3 and 1, 2 and 3 and 1, 2 and three and 1, 2 and 3, and 1, 2, and 3.

And again, 1, 2, 3.

Okay, and this is our first switch into our first bar chord, B minor. That's life. You just practice when you're on F sharp minor. To get into that B minor. All you have to do, shift these two fingers down. You don't even have to adjust your first finger. Okay. Shift these two fingers down. Get that second finger in place. Okay. Very easy transition to practice. It's not easy to master, but that's a great way to work. It's very common to in songs that you will go from F sharp minor to B minor. Okay. So you saw I did move my whole hand because I'm just used to doing that. But for now, if you want to just practice getting these fingers to move, that's what I would do. So that is strumming pattern number one for this song. So if I played through a verse with you so that we can practice the timing, it would sound like this. And if you need the notes for this, you can go to my website, laurenbateman.com I have all the lesson notes over there as well. So we'll start from the top of the verse. We got 1, 2, 3.

1, 2, 3.

He's a young cowboy he lives on the range his horse and his cattle his only companions.

He works in the saddle and sleeps in in the canyon.

Waiting for summer this past just to change.

And then we got as the moon rises as we come in. So as we get into this next verse, you might want to sit and practice that timing because what we're going to do is what I like to do on this song, which is accent the bass notes for each chord. It gives a little bit more feeling to the song, a little bit more movement. What's that going to sound like?

So you can see I'm being really aggressive on the bass note, but I'm kind of being gentle on the rest of the strumming. Whereas before I kind of kept everything almost the same volume. Right. So we kind of have.

Still sounds nice, still sounds lovely. But here I've kind of got a little bit more dynamics to it.

Letting the guitar sing a little bit more. I'm being gentle with it. So what am I doing here instead of just going. It's the same rhythm.

One, two and three and one, two and three and one, two and three.

M. It's just on the one. I'm just trying to get the bass note of the chord. So for all of our six string chords, which would be G F sharp minor in the E chords as well as this D F sharp. But I think that only shows up in the intro, so you don't have to worry about that too much. So basically G and the E chords in the F sharp minor. We're going to hit this top. E string. All right. That's going to be Our bass note and then our five string chords. Any of the A chords, the B minor chord, we're going to be hitting the fifth string. And then any of those D chords, we're going to be using the fourth string as our bass note. And what we want to do, let's just start on this G chord. We want to practice going bass, getting that top string, and then just gently strumming the treble notes. And I'm not strumming the whole chord. People ask me all the time, lauren, are you strumming the whole chord? I'm probably only getting the bottom three or four strings of the chord.

So I'm letting that I got a good attack on the bass note. We want that bass note to ring.

And I'm just kind of gently glazing over the bottom strings.

So I'm not.

Because especially when you're targeting just those treble notes, that can. Can sound a little bit harsh. So we want to go gentle on those bottom strings.

It makes the guitar just sing a little bit more. So now this second verse is going to sound like this.

And as the moon rises he sits by his fire Thinking about women in glasses appear and closing his eyes. As the dog ears retire he sings.

Out a song which is soft, but it's clear, as if maybe someone would hear.

Then we jump right into our chorus.

Good night ye moonlight ladies Rockaby sweet baby James.

Deep greens and blues are.

The colors I choose Won't you let me go down in my dreams and rock A by Sweet Baby Jane.

Now some of you probably saw on those G chords, sometimes I use the third and fourth fingers. So some people find it easy when we're going from a D chord like this to leave the third finger in place and just plop the pinky below. It gives a little brighter tone. And I think that's a nice little addition to the chorus to kind of change things up a little bit. I don't know if James is exactly doing that, but my muscle memory was. And I just wanted to point that out to you. You also. I wanted to point out that I had trouble going from that B minor into the E7. I didn't quite get my pinky down in time. If you guys noticed that. Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. But I like to leave the mistakes in. So you guys see I'm not perfect. I make mistakes too. So what did I do? I tried to get the pinky down, but I just played the E chord and it didn't matter. Okay? I didn't make a big deal about it, that I made a mistake and I just kept playing through it and we played through the song. So if you enjoyed this James Taylor song like I mentioned earlier, go check out my Fire and Rain video over there. I give you a simplified way to play that. James's songs are not easy, but I try to make them accessible to students. I hope you had fun. I'll see you in another lesson video real soon.