A short YouTube guitar lesson by Lauren Bateman teaching how to play Buddy Holly’s "That'll Be The Day." The video covers chord progressions (A, D, E, with B7 and E7 substitutions), two strumming pattern options (simple down-strums with an up-strum vs. eighth-note down-up pattern), the song structure (chorus starts the song, then verse and a 12-bar-blues-style solo), and an easy B7 substitute for beginners. The instructor references a chord chart on her website and demonstrates a simple bluesy lick for the solo.
Chapters
Hey, guitar enthusiasts, welcome back. In this video, we're going to be going over a classic by Buddy Holly called that'll Be the Day. I love this song because we're just using our A, D, E chords. We do have a B7 that drops in. I'll show you how to do a quick, easy fix for that in this video. So let's get into it.
This is a great song just because of the. The cool string strumming stuff you can do. We've got some seven chords that pop in, so if you haven't used those before, you can start practicing with those. And if you don't know those seven chords, you can always play the regular chord. So don't forget, my website has the chord chart. I'll put a link in the description below. Go grab that, come back and we're gonna go through how to play this song. So there's three sections to this song. The verse, the chorus, and the solo. What we're going to do is we're going to start on the chorus because this song actually starts with the chorus as opposed to the verse. So let's talk about the chords and then how we're going to go about strumming this. So the chord progression for the verse is 2 Ds, 2 as 2 Ds followed by an A chord that we're going to hold and then a split measure of E7 and A. And I'm going to show you how to strum that. So let's start off with a general strumming pattern. I'm going to give you two ways to play it. So depending on your skill level, you can either take the easier way or the hard way. So the easier way is just to play all down strums and do an up strum on the second measure. So most of these chords are two measures. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. So on this first section where we have two Ds, you can go 1.
2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4th, and 4.
So see what we're doing on the second measure, we're just putting one up strum at the end, which will get you into the A chord.
And so you can really. Even with just four down strums and one little up strum, you can already hear the song coming out of the guitar. If you want to spice it up a little bit, we can just do lots of downs and ups. So basically just putting eighth notes in between every single down Strum. So it'll sound like this 1 and.
2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and four. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and4. 1 and 2 and 3 and4.
And no matter what you do on this next A chord, you're just gonna strum it and hold it for four counts.
So it'll be 1, 2, 3, 3, 4.
And then we get into the next measure, which is an E7 and an A chord. And we don't strum the E7 until the third beat. Now, the great thing about this is it lines up with the lyrics. So it's going to be when I die. So the E7 takes over the when I.
When I.
And then the A gets the die.
So that'll be the day when I die.
So that's how that section is gonna sound. So one more time. So we've got.
You say you're gonna leave. You know it's a lie well, that'll be the day that I die so.
That'S how that verse is gonna end, which brings us. Or, sorry, that's how the chorus is gonna end, which brings us out into our verse. So the verse chord progression is a little bit different. It's da, da, da. And then we have a B7 and an E7 chord. So the strumming, we're not going to really do anything different from the strumming. Again, you can pick one of those two. But if you're not familiar with a B7 chord, which is this chord here. Beautiful, beautiful sounding chord. Especially if you like blues, if you don't know how to do the B7 chord yet, what I would recommend is just doing the bottom three strings of a D chord without the third finger down. So if you need an easy fix, if you're an absolute beginner and you haven't gotten into chords yet, the easy fix is to play a D chord and remove your third finger and just play the bottom three strings. It's not going to sound as full or as nice as the B7, but it's a way to make this a little bit more towards your skill level if you haven't learned that B7 chord just yet. Now, the solo is. What's the last section? And the cool thing about this solo is it's really just 12 bars blues. All right, so we're taking the solo and we're going to be playing A for four measures. Then we have D for two measures, followed by A for two measures. We have an E7, we have A D chord, we have an A chord and we have an E7. Now there's a really interesting part that if you want to add in a little spice to blues this up a little bit, you can. So the solo comes in and we're just going to be playing the chords underneath the solo and we've got this A.
So if you want to switch over to a shuffle pattern at this point, you can, because they're going to throw some blue stuff in here. Or if you just want to stick with.
That, will work just fine too. But when we get to this D chord, if you want to throw this little spice in there, you can. We're going to be playing a very classic little blues piece here. We're going to have our first finger on the second fret of the third string and we're going to be playing the open, open D string and then the second fret of the G string. I don't know what I said before, but second fret of the G string and we're going to be going.
Ooh, did you hear that? Very classic blues sounding lick here? So we're playing.
So it's 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and.
And we're taking our third finger and we're pressing on the fourth fret.
Of that same string, that G string.
So it's 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and so 1 and 2 and 3 and 4and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4&.
And then when we get to the next chord, the A, we're going to move the first finger up to the second fret on the fourth string and we've got same thing.
Same thing on the A string. So same thing, same second fret is played by the first finger and then the third finger is going to be playing the fourth. So let me just go in for a quick close up so you guys can see it. So here is the D. And we're going to be going second fret, fourth fret, second fret, fourth fret. So it's going to sound like this.
There's the A.
And then we're going to jump back to our E7, which is just normal.
So like I said, you can either just stick with the straight strumming or if you want to throw in that little spice, you can. It just adds a little bit of fun. If you go and listen to the song, you're gonna hear it and you're probably gonna want to do it. So go check that out. If you guys enjoyed this lesson. Make sure to, like, comment and subscribe. Let me know what songs you guys might want me to do on my YouTube channel here. And YouTube's gonna suggest a couple more videos for you guys over here. Go check those out. Keep practicing, keep working hard, and I'll see you guys in another lesson video.
