Summer Of 69 Guitar Lesson - Acoustic Guitar With Strumming And Chords
A spoken guitar lesson by Lauren Bateman teaching how to play "Summer of '69'" by Bryan Adams on acoustic guitar. The video covers: simple verse/intro using D and A (two measures each), an all-eighth-note downstroke strumming pattern and an intermediate syncopated accented-eighths pattern (accents on beat 1, the "and" of 2, and beat 4), optional palm-muting to bring out accents, the chorus progression (B minor → A → D → G) with a final held A leading back to double-D/double-A, and a mostly-bar-chord bridge (F → Bb → C → Bb → F → Bb → C×2) with power-chord/top-string alternatives. Also demonstrates a finger-lift suspended-chord fill for the D and A interlude and recommends bar chords for the bridge but offers simpler options for beginners.
Chapters
Hey, guitar enthusiast Lauren Bateman here. In this video, we're going to be going over how to play Summer of 69 by Bryan Adams. Very, very cool song. Have a lot of cool things to show you. Let's get into the lesson.
Hey, guys, real quick, before we jump in the lesson, just want to say a couple quick thank yous to some of my YouTube supporters. Robert Barzak, Kevin Slater, Charles Osborne. Thank you guys so much for your donations. I really appreciate your support here on my YouTube channel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Let's get into the lesson video. So, for the most part, this song can be played to a beginner level. The chords are easy enough. So I'll start this lesson off easy and then we'll get into some more intermediate style or beginner intermediate style playing. There is a bridge section that I would recommend playing as all bar chords. And if you don't know bar chords yet, you don't have to play, you know, you don't have to play that section. Or you could just play the bass notes on, give you some options. So let's start off with the verses of this song. So fortunately, the intro and the verses are very simple. It's all just a D chord. And an A chord doesn't get much easier than that D to a great transition to practice. So basically it's two A's, two D's, two A's, two D's, two A's, two D's,' back and forth, back and forth. Very simple. But how are we gonna strum that? So let's talk about the very same simple strumming pattern we're going to use. And then I'll give you a little bit more of a beginner intermediate pattern that I like to use when I play the song that's a little bit more syncopated. So let's start with that beginner one. So like I said, we're going to have two Ds followed by two as. And the strumming pattern, we're just going to do all eighth notes, straight up.
Eighth notes, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
And we're going to do those all as downs. And this song is quick. So if 8th notes are too much for you, just do the quarter notes. 1, 2, 3, 4, and. And you should be able to keep up. So it's going to be 1 and.
2 and 3 and 4, and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4S and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and 2 and 3 and Four and 1 and 2 and 3 and FOUR and.
And you can accent the one like I was just doing if you want to, to just give a little bit of a groove to the song. But that's the easiest way to do this. Like I said, all eighth notes.
1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and four. And 1 and 2 and 3, and 4.
But you can see it's a peppy song, so doing all that down strums might be a little bit tricky for you, so just stick to the quarter notes. If you want to spice it up a little bit, which is what I like to do. We're going to stick with the eighth notes, but we're going to be doing a syncopated accented rhythm. You can learn more about these in my guitar course if you want, but this is a pretty common one that you can use. And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be accenting the first beat, the and on the two and the fourth beat. So it's basically going to be 1.
And 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
Those are where our accents are. So it's going to sound like this.
One and two and three and four. And one and two and three and four. And one and two and three and four dot and one and two and three and Four.
Or if you want to palm mute it.
With. Which is probably how I would play the song because now those accents really ring out. So palm muting is just placing the palm of your picking hand right in front of the bridge of the guitar. And this sounds really great on an electric. If you have some distortion, but place the palm right on the bridge of the guitar. I do have a whole video on palm muting that I'll put up here for you guys if you want to go check that out. But you can hear with the palm muting that you can hear those accents a lot more.
One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and 1 and 2.
So I would call that a little bit more of like an intermediate skill for your strumming. And again, I have a lot more of this stuff in my. In my online guitar course too, if you guys are interested@laurenbateman.com but that's the intro and the verse. Let's jump into the chorus where things change up just a little bit. Hey guys, real quick, if you're enjoying this video, don't forget to subscribe to the channel would really appreciate that. Let's keep going with the lesson. So the chorus introduced our first bar chord which is a B minor bar chord. Now if you don't know bar chords yet, you can always use the simplified version which is a three fingered version.
On the bottom three strings I'll put a chord, a little chord diagram up here. But it's your first finger, second finger and third finger on the bottom three strings. It's not the nicest sounding because it's not a full chord. But if you don't know the full bar chord, it'll help you get through the song. So we're going to be starting off with B minor followed by an A major chord followed by D major followed by G major and then we repeat that. So it's going to be B minor, A major, D major, G major and then the last time three, it's going to be B minor and then we're going to hold the A. So it'll be those were the best.
Days of my life.
Those were the best days of my life.
So so that's how that part is going to go. So we're just going to hold that A and then we have back into double D, double A which takes us back into the chorus. So if I go through that chorus real quick, it'll be.
Chorus gonna be there. Those are the best days of my.
So don't lose your place like I did when I was reading the music. But that's essentially how the chorus is going to sound. And you can hear how that palm muting rhythm really adds a super, super cool dynamic to this song. So we've done the verse, we've done the chorus. Let's check out our bridge. Hey guys, quick reminder before we get into this bridge, if you're enjoying the video, please give me a like because it helps YouTube show my videos to more people just like you. All right, this bridge is where this song really, really gets cool. The unfortunate side is it's mostly bar chords. All right, we have an F chord, a B flat bar chord and a C which yes, you're saying C is an open chord. Could you play it open? But I'm going to show you why I would probably play this as bar chords or even power chords if you want to simplify it. If you can't play bar chords, just play power chords which are mini bar chords. Alright? They're the top half of a barre chord. So we're going to talk about this bridge and there's a really cool part at the end that I'm going to show you, which is also super awesome. So the chord progression is F, B flat, C, B flat, F, B flat, double C. Alright, so if you're going to play the full bar chords, we're basically taking an F bar chord, which is at the first fret, and we're moving it along the neck of the guitar so we have an F. And then B flat will be at the sixth fret. You could play B flat here, but especially on acoustic guitar, these double bars tend to be hard for beginner students or even beginner intermediate students if you're learning bar chords. So I would just recommend staying on the top string. So we're going to go from F.
Killing time.
So now we're at the sixth fret. And then the eighth fret's gonna be our C chord.
We were young and restless and needed to unwind.
So again, we would just keep with the eighth note strumming pattern here. So we have the F bar ch.
And you can hear I'm still doing that accented eighth note rhythm. I'm not doing the palm muting on this section because the bridge is very different. So it's nice to make the bridge sound different. And the next part that's coming up is super different. Super cool. I'm going to show you a really fun way to kind of play this interlude before we get into the next part verse. So after we've gone through our chorus, there's this cool double D double A part. And you could just keep playing that as eighth notes. But I like to spice it up a little bit. So kind of doing.
What the heck was I doing there? So you'll have to have a little bit more flexibility in your fingers to do this. But it sounds awesome. And this is used in a lot of songs. If you think of songs like Free Falling or something, there's an easy way to play it. But this kind of D and lifting the fingers, we're using what we call like suspended chords. But all we're doing. So if we start with the D chord.
It'S basically a D chord. Putting your fin, your, your finky, your pinky down. There's that high note. So it's.
Lift up the pinky and then lift up the second finger G. What does that sound like?
There you go.
I just taught you how to play free falling too, so you're welcome. All right, so we got the D chord. Pinky down, pinky up, second finger up. Okay, so.
And then second finger down. Pinky down.
Hear it.
One more time.
And now we're just going to do that same thing on the A major chord. And I'll go in on a close up for that so you guys can see exactly what I'm doing. So here's the A chord and here it's the same thing.
Pinky down.
Pinky up. Okay, and then we're going to lift the third finger on the A chord.
Alright? So it was pinky down. So it's A chord, Pinky down, pinky up. Lift the third finger, A chord, pinky down. So all together for the D chord we have D, Pinky D. Second finger up, D, pinky Then a pinky, A finger up, a pinky.
All right, so here we are in that close up. So we have the D chord.
Pinky comes down.
Pinky comes up.
Bottom finger comes up, bottom finger goes down, Pinky goes down.
All right, so that's the order.
So one more time, so you have D chord, pinky down, pinky up, bottom finger up, bottom finger down, pinky down. So it'll sound like this.
Again. One more time for the D.
Now for the A chord.
It's essentially the same thing. So we have A chord, pinky down, Pinky up, bottom finger up, A chord, pinky down.
Okay, so one more time. So we have pinky down or sorry, A chord, pinky down, A chord, bottom finger up, bottom finger down, pinky down. So it'll sound like this.
Again.
So all together, both of them.
Very, very cool sounding part of the song. Love the bridge. Probably my favorite favorite part of this entire song. So let's get in how we're going to wrap up and finish up this song. So once again we have another verse which we're just going to play normal with the syncopated patterns. We're going to. We have a final chorus that has our A hold and then at the end it's just going to be a bunch of double Ds and a bunch of double A's. You can throw in some of the stuff we did on the end of the bridge or you could just do all straight up 8th notes. Either way works out you're going to end the song on a nice held D. The song is super fun. I hope you guys have fun practicing it. YouTube's going to suggest a couple more videos over here, but go over and check those out. I have a lot more lessons for you guys to learn. Thanks so much. Don't forget to comment, like and subscribe and hopefully I'll see you in another lesson. Video.
