Learning The Guitar vs. Learning Songs?
- John Astor
- Jun 23
- 3 min read
It doesn’t have to be like that at all and it shouldn’t ever be like that. We learn so we can play. It’s important to apply things you learn to songs, for sure. It’s also important to learn what makes a song the way it is. What are the technical elements behind them? This is crucial to learning the instrument. For classical players it’s a bit different as there are lots of technical studies to develop one’s overall abilities and those are essential in the path of a dedicated learner.
For songs, there are lots of great videos on YouTube that teach you how to play that you quickly want to learn, which is wonderful to get some nuances and the overall picture. Take a song that a lot of young learners jump into and like to play; The Animals’, ‘House of the Rising Sun’. For a basic player the chord making hand uses first level chords, but the picking hand does them one note at a time, which adds identity and lots of color, so great.
It's important to realize that one could analyze a song forever, but looking into what makes these chord work well and the picking hand’s patterns and a couple variations can set up a model for what a song can teach us, beyond the song itself.
The chords are; Am (La minor), C (Do), D (Re), F (Fa) and E (Mi). They move like this, one string at a time.
Am / C / D / F / Am / C / E / E / Am / C / D / F / Am / C / E / Am / E
Ok. We can find out how these chords are related. This is really cool because once we see the ‘family’ of chords, we can put them together in all kids of ways and they sound great because they are, as we call it, ‘inside’. In the next blog, I’ll go over those for you. So great.
Now, let’s take C, G, Am, F chords from our song and do those. I’ll put my own beat to it but you can choose any beat you want, fast, slow, rock, folk, hip hop, whatever. If you want a drummer, go to YouTube and search for Drums 100 BPM (beats per minute) and then play along. It’s fun and it will build your groove too!
C / G / Am / F / …and repeat a few times
A little different but it works. Now let’s try it with the picking hand doing something a little different. Instead of going down each string, let’s play the same first note but then go to the highest string and go backwards until you go down low again.
What’s best is that you mix these chords up your own way (your choice, E or Em) and pick the strings any way you want. Then sing a bit on top of it, come up with some words and then you’re in. it’s your own song.
After a while you’ll have a bunch of chords to choose from and a bunch of picking styles too, words will come easier and your singing gets better and then Voila! You’re a song writer! That’s the way to do this, be somebody and join the musical family of the world.
