Tennessee Whiskey Guitar Lesson to Sound Like The Record

Hey, guitar enthusiasts, I'm going to show you a great three chord song by Chris Stapleton. Has kind of an interesting timing to it, but we're going to break it down step by step. Let's start with the chords. We're going to be using three chords. A major, D major and B minor. All right? And yes, that's a bar chord. If you are not great with bar chords, I can show you a simple way to simplify the B chord. Just don't play the full bar, okay? Just take that first finger and just play the high E string at the second fret and you'll have a B minor chord. It's not going to sound as nice as the full B minor chord, but it will get you through the song if you're not great with bar chords. So once again, that's A major, D major and B minor. Now the chord progression for this song is very simple. All right? It's a, B minor, D and A. And then we just keep repeating that throughout the entire song. So there's not a lot to think about on that. But the strumming and the timing of, of this song is a little bit intricate. So I'm going to try and break it down as much as possible, simplify it a little bit. I'm going to show you two ways you can go about doing it. Let's get into it.

So the interesting part about this song is it's in what we call 12, 8 time. And you're like, lauren, what does that mean? So a lot of music you're probably used to counting in is in four, four time. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, Four. One, two, three, 4 or 3, four time. One, two,. Three. One, two, three. One, two, three. And this song is a little bit more relative to that waltz feel. Let's just take a quick listen. 1, 2, 3.

Hear that swing. We can kind of sway to the music, right?

So you can hear here what we're doing here. It's kind of got that waltz feel to it. Now it's in 12, eight time, which means we have to count to 12. And that's a little bit tricky when you're trying to count and play music and sing at the same time. So my recommendation to simplify this is just to think of it as two measures of six. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3,4, 4, 5, 6. Lot easier to think about than having to count to 12. I'm going to show you why this first strumming pattern I'm going to show you is a Very simple pattern that will get you through. Okay. It's not going to sound exactly like the song, but it'll work out just great. So we're just going to do one down strum per count. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, 4, 5, 6. One, two, three, Four, five, six.

And you probably hear I'm doing something special on one of the beats, okay? So on the four, I'm actually strumming the entire chord. On the other strums, I'm really only catching the bass notes. So on the A chord, you know, I'm probably catching the top three strings. I'm trying to ignore the E string and the B string as much as possible because when I get to that fourth beat, I'm going to strum the whole chord in. Those bright sounds of the higher strings are going to ring out. So this is what it's going to sound like. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six.

So that's what I'm saying. If you count to six, six, it's a little bit easier because every time you hit the four, you know, I gotta put a little bit extra oomph in that four. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six.

Okay. And don't worry, I know you guys saw me play the little intro.

I'm going to show you how to play that. Don't worry. Stick around at the end. I'll show you how to play the whole, whole intro and how we can incorporate it into our strumming. But let me talk about the second strumming pattern first, which will sound a little bit more like the song. So this second strumming pattern is going to incorporate some up strums. Okay. And it's still going to have that waltz feel. But now we're going to be counting in in officially like eighth notes. Okay. So it'll be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, 5 and 6 and. And the reason again that I'm doing this in what we call 68 versus 12 8, I think it's just much easier to think about counting wise. So this strum pattern is going to sound like this.

It's got more of the feel of what you hear on the record. So it's basically a round. Okay. So all I'm doing is going down.

Up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down up D down up, down, up, down.

So we're doing this as like a round. Down, up, down, up. Okay, and if you want to know the count, I've written it out here. It's 1 and 3 and 4 and 6 and 1 and 3 and 4. Okay, so it's this kind of round that we get into. So if I do it again for you here, nice and slow, it's going to be 1 and 3 and 4 and 6 and 1 and 3 and 4 and 6, 1 and 3 and 4.

Up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down.

Okay, so you can hear the feel of this. Now when I'm playing this song, I'm not counting the rhythm in my head. I'm more feeling when the chord change is taking place. So.

Okay, so I'm more feeling what's happening with this rhythm as opposed to counting it. But just one more time, nice and slow, let's get this in. And I'm going to show you how to add those little embellishments that you heard on the beginning, the intro and that little quick change that I did on the end there. So let's take it from the top again. Ready? One, two, three. Ready?

And down, up, down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up down, up, down.

That's our strumming pattern over the progression. And you're going to use it for the entire song. And again, if that's a little bit too tricky for you, just use the first strumming pattern. But now I'm going to show you how to add the embellishments in over either one of those strumming patterns. So let's talk about the really quick intro here. Okay, so it's just a little lead in line. We're going.

Into our A chord. Alright, so it's an open E string, second fret on that high E string or sorry, low E string, I guess, high end of the guitar. So open E string, second fret, open A string, strum the A chord.

Okay, so open second fret, open strum. And if you put that together, it's.

Okay. And I will show you at the end of this tutorial how to play the entire lead line, if you're interested. Just focusing on the strumming right now. So you heard on the end on that A chord. And he does this, I think, every single time on that second A chord in the progression. What he does is he quickly jumps to the D chord on the Second six count. Okay, so if what. No matter what strumming pattern you're doing, if you go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3, 4,.

5, 6, 1.

So it's a six and then back to the chord. Alright? 1, 2, 3, 4th, 5, 6. 1, two, three, four, five, six, one. And if you're doing the other one, one.

Okay. Whenever you get to the six beat, I might have changed that strumming a little bit. Let's try that one more time.

Okay, that's what it is. So when you get to that six count on the very end, you're going to go to a D chord and then right back to the A chord. So what I'm going to do before I show you how to play this entire intro lead line is I'm going to play an intro, I'm going to play a verse and a chorus so that we can just go through a little bit of the song and you guys can work on the timing. Now if I'm going too fast, you can always use the settings cog down below to slow me down. But we're going to take it from the intro. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3.

Used to spend my nights out in the bathroom.

Liquor was the only love I've ever known.

But you rescued me from reaching the.

Bott the moon.

And brought me back from being thousand down.

Your sm.

It's Tennessee whiskey.

You're as sweet.

As strawberry wine.

You'Re as one.

Now I left a mistake in there on that chorus because I was jumping from the D chord to the A chord a little bit too quickly. But I just want to show you, when you're making a mistake in a song, it's okay. I'm human. I still make mistakes. But sometimes practice playing through the mistake. It's a lot better to play through the mistake than completely stop the song. Okay, so you guys may have noticed that mistake and maybe you didn't notice the mistake because maybe I didn't make a big deal out of it either. So let's talk about the intro section to the song. Little lead line. It's not really that hard to play. Let's go through it step by step. So I kind of already showed you the first three notes. Okay. It's the open E string. Second fret on the E string. Open A string. Now this next section, we have a lot of slides. We're going to be doing a lot of sliding between the second and the fourth string. Sorry, second and fourth fret on this A string. So when you're sliding, you have to make sure that you're pressing into the string in the fret hard enough to slide through the frets. Okay? So again, those first three notes open to open. And then I'm gonna slide. I'll use my second finger here. Second fret into the fourth fret. So it's.

Okay. You could do it with your first finger too.

Okay. Either way you want.

So we got bottom, bom, bom.

And now we're gonna do slide up back. Okay.

Ooh, little double slide. So it's 2, slide into 4, back to 2, open string 2, slide into 4, back To 2. So it's going to sound like this.

Okay. So when you're playing lead lines, like this is a very single, single lead line.

So you don't need to worry about the timing so much if you can sing it. So we've got.

So this third part, we're doing a triple slide, but we're only sliding back out to that second fret on the very end one. So it's going to be slide, slide, slide out.

Now, some of you I'm feeling, you're like, man, my finger's burning. Because, you know when you're rubbing on these round wound strings, sometimes you can get that friction. But don't worry, you're not going to be sitting here forever doing this. We're just practicing. It'll be much easier when you go through. So the first three sections we've got.

And then we got.

And then the very last one is.

So we're sliding in and out and then open a. So I'm going to try playing this over the chord progression so that you guys can see where it fits in over the chords. Listen through once and then go back play again. Try and play along with me. Ready? So we got 1, 2, 3.

Here we go. Ready?

So if you enjoyed playing the lead lines in Tennessee Whiskey, then I would highly recommend you go check out my pentatonic guitar lesson right over there so that you can learn the first scale that every lead guitar player needs to know.