Who’ll Stop The Rain Guitar Lesson - Strumming Pattern Picking & Chords

Hey, everybody, welcome back. In this lesson video, we're going to be doing a great song by CCR called who Stopped the Rain? Let's get into the lesson video.

This is a cool song. It has a bunch of different things we can do. We're going to do some picking. I'll show you some picking if you want to do that. We'll go over the strumming pattern and we'll get into everything you need to know to be able to play this song. Just a quick reminder, if you need the chord chart for this song, go to laurenbateman.com under the song section. I have all my songs listed there. You can go print out the chart, come back here and follow along. So this intro, I have a couple options for you. We have a strumming way of doing it and we have a picking way of doing it. But first, let's start with the strumming way. Fortunately, the chords are easy enough. It's a G and an E minor chord. If you're doing the strumming, the picking will really take care of the walk down. But if you want to throw that in, I'll show you how to do that. So for the strumming, what we're going to do is just basically straight up 8th notes. Don't kill it. Don't go.

Relax the strumming hand. It's just a soft strum.

Very soft. Okay. And all we're doing is 1 and.

2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 & 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, 1 and 2 and 3. 1 and 2 and 3 and.

4. Just a G chord to an E minor. So. So basically it goes double G, double E minor, double G on the way to the E minor. You can throw in a walk down if you want. The picking is going to take care of it. But if you're playing by yourself, maybe you want to throw the walk down in. So what we're going to do is we're going to take our G chord, play a full measure of strumming.

1 and 2 and 3 and.

4. And on the second measure, we're going to put a walk down on. On the fourth beat. And all we're doing is we're lifting up our second finger here, removing it. And we're going to play the bass note, which is F sharp on the top string. So second fret on the top string. So it's going to be 1.

And 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and.

4. 1 and 2 and 3 and so hear that 4. So I just stopped strumming and I just, on the fourth beat, played that second fret on the top string, let it ring out for one beat and then jump right into E minor. So once again, it's 1 and.

2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. 1 and.

2. And so that'll give you the cool sound for the intro. But if you want to spice it up and you want to learn how to do the picking, that's what I'm going to show you next. If you guys like this video, don't forget real quick to subscribe to the channel this way. You'll see when I put out new lessons just like this. So let's do the intro for this real quick. Okay, so the picking pattern for the intro, we're basically going to be doing G and E minor and the top one, the rhythm is one and two. And for most of it. So it's going to be the sixth string, the second string, the third string and the first string.

That's the.

Rhythm. One and two.

And.

So we do that twice because we're doing a G chord. And I'll show you how to throw the walk downs in after. Next we're going to go to an E minor chord. And really you just need to leave the finger on the bottom string because we're not hitting any of those other notes played by the E minor. So all open notes except for this bottom finger, third fret, bottom string. So just leave that down. Same pattern. Six, two, three, one.

And I'm picking down, down, up, down. Just so you know which way my pick is moving. So it's down, down, up. Strings six, two, three, one. Okay, and then you would do that twice. And then we go back to G.

All right, you can see here, I don't even have to put that finger down because I'm not using it. But if you want to play a full G chord, go for it. So there's a couple of walk downs. So now that you've kind of got the timing of it. So it's 1 and 2 and 3.

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

Dot and then you would go into the strumming for the verse. So let's throw in those walk downs. We're going to add those on the four. So it's going to come in second measure. Just like the strumming. We're going to add it on the fourth beat, the first one is after G. So we've got g. We do 1, 3, 4. So first finger on that top string. Second fret. So again it'll.

Be.

3.

4. And then E minor.

Now on this E minor, we're going to play the D open. D string on the fourth. So it's.

Okay. So after G we had.

And then E minor.

And then we hit that D string. Okay. And then back to G.

Okay, so we got.

And then strum, which brings us into the verse. So you can see that I can do this without needing to look at my strings and my guitar. All right, so you might want, or you might need to practice one chord at a time watching the strings. Because I was watching the music. The other thing is just to memorize the music and then you can watch your hands. But since I don't have the music memorized, I don't need to look at my right picking hand. So that's something you can work on in your practice. Try working on getting away from not always having to look at the strings all the time. So let's get into our verse. Hey, guys, if you're enjoying this video, don't forget to give me a thumbs up below. It helps YouTube show people just like you more of my videos. All right, so for the verse, what we're going to do here is it's. It's really all simple chords. It's my four simple chords that I like to teach my beginners. But we have a double G, C, G. And then it repeats that double G, cg. Then we have C, G, C, G, C, D, E minor, G, G. Wow, that's a lot of chords. But if you have the chord chart, you should be fine. And all we're going to do is just that simple eighth note strumming pattern.

And remember, keep it soft. Don't kill the guitar.

Right N. And.

Soft.

Confusion on the.

Ground. Now, see, we got good.

Man. Through the.

Ages. So back to C, C to.

G.

C to D.

Key minor and.

G.

I don't know if they actually pause in the song. I just felt like pausing. Let me check that real quick. So I just checked the recording. It doesn't actually. It doesn't pause. But there's something else that I kind of heard in the strumming. If you want to. If you want to throw this in as a little bonus. Bonus. All right, so it sounds like there's a little bit of a hop in in the strumming pattern. So this eighth note pattern works out great. It's.

Fine.

And I wonder, and I wonder who stopped the.

Ra.

No problem. It almost sounds like there's a little hop on.

So we're missing the down strum on the two. That's all I'm. I was just hearing a little bit of a hop in the strumming pattern. So it'll sound like this. If we go back to a G chord, it's going to be 1.

And, and 3 and 4, and 1 and, and 3 and.

4. And just a slight change, but it makes a big difference in the sound. So it's going to be down.

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

Up. So that is another strumming pattern that if you play, it'll probably sound a little bit more like the song. So if you want to use that, great. If you're not good at skipping up strums, don't worry about it. Just stick with the straight up eighth note pattern. So. So we go through another verse in this and then we get this really cool instrumental part that has some unique rhythms and timings to it. So the instrumental, we're going to be starting on a G chord. And for some of these, if you want to hold them, I would probably strum, but you can hold the chords. But we're going to do a full measure of G.

And then it's going to be D, A minor, C, C. Those are the three chords, D, A minor, C. And they're changing on I and IV. Okay, so it's 1 and 2.

And 3 and 4 and 1 and.

2. I lost my.

Chords. 1 and 2 and 3 and.

4. Okay, so 1 and 2 and.

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

Four. And then there's a measure of.

C. 1 and 2 and 3 and.

Four. That C you probably could just hold if you wanted to. But I'm going to strum just for the timing of it. So we get C, 1 and.

2 and 3 and.

4. And then we have E minor, D, G, same timing, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And then we have a G 1, 2, 3, 4, on D. And then we're back into G.

So if I play the whole thing through, it's going to be g 1 and 2.

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

4. And so that's that part. So we go 1 and 2.

And 3 and 4and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 dot 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4,. And then 1, 2, 3.

4.

All right, so. And that's where you know on that G, where you go 1 and.

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

4. Instead of hitting another G, you could probably just hold it out and it'll sound perfectly fine. A little note that I realized when I was strumming. So if you notice my right hand, even though we've got the syncopated timing and we're just hitting the chords for one strum, the. And so that was that A minor. I'm hitting on an up.

Strum. So it's down, up, down.

Down, up.

Down. And the same thing with the D on the E minor.

Progression. Down, up.

Down. So you see, my hand never stops.

Drumming. 1 and 2 and 3 and.

4 and down, up.

Down.

Down, up, down, 2, 3.

4.

And that's a great way to work on timing in. In your strumming is just keep this hand going. Don't stop it. Because I can keep time with my hand without necessarily always needing to count in my head. Eventually you'll be able to start feeling these things and you won't have to count anything out loud anymore. So finally, the outro. We've got one more verse here. And, you know, basically on the end, we're gonna hold E minor.

And then we have our outro, which is literally repetition of the intro. So if you can play the intro, you can play the outro, and you've got this entire song. Hope you guys enjoyed this lesson video. Don't forget to like and comment the video. And don't forget to subscribe to the channel. YouTube's gonna pop a couple more videos up over here. Go check those out. Would love to see you guys in another lesson video.