Writing guitar chord songs is an excellent way to practice chord progressions and build strumming rhythm. To make an engaging chord song, find an idea that complements your chords before creating an appropriate melody for it.
Transitioning between chord shapes takes practice and patience, so to ease things along you could start by practicing moving your dominant 1st finger first.
And It Stoned Me
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic guitar tune “Underwater Revival” makes an excellent starter song, employing various chord progressions – but the main one remains quite straightforward and repeats throughout the song, providing beginners an ideal opportunity to introduce more chords into their strumming patterns.
R.E.M’s four-chord track is ideal for beginning guitarists looking to sharpen their chord progression skills while adding rock elements into their playing style. Furthermore, this song also demonstrates an additive chord which provides beginners with valuable practice opportunities.
Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)
Learn this Green Day song note-for-note on guitar with this lesson featuring video instruction, performance play-through video, full tabs and chords, download files in MP4 format for use on PC’s, Macs or iPads as well as download files containing lesson files in this format.
“Good Riddance” by Green Day was written prior to recording their fifth album Nimrod and explored a folk style with Armstrong writing the lyrics about accepting people coming and going in their life – Armstrong wrote this song when his girlfriend left Ecuador after she had been his “time of your life”. Since then, this tune has become a mainstay at concerts worldwide; often used as the last song before an encore performance begins.
Sweet Jane
Sweet Jane’s simple chord progression and steady tempo makes her the ideal song for beginning guitar players to learn with, while its open chords present a great opportunity for exploration of open chords with various finger positions that accompany them.
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic song provides another excellent opportunity to practice strumming. Requiring only three chords throughout its entirety, it makes playing easy.
Though Lou Reed never provided an explicit meaning of this song, many believe that its subject matter may pertain to drugs or society’s expectations. Whatever its true intent may be, this timeless rock tune will have others singing along and singing along!
Tangerine
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s three-chord classic is easy to play and provides an ideal opportunity to improve your strumming technique. Once you’ve mastered its chords, try adding in some hammer-ons or pull-offs for added flair.
Chord diagrams offer a useful way to visualize how fingers should be placed on the fretboard when playing certain chords. Each dot represents which finger should be on each fret and an x indicates which string should be played and which left muted.
Barre chords are an integral component of guitar-chord theory and can be used to produce different timbres, making them particularly useful when using a capo to extend chords up the neck.
Bad Moon Rising
At first, Sonic Youth’s early no wave recordings had an amorphous, murky darkness; however, with Bad Moon Rising this darkness took on more defined form. Inspired by Creedence Clearwater Revival classics such as Bad Moon Rising is an album which explores America’s fascination with death while exploring hippie culture’s promise.
Moore and Lydia Lunch may not always hit their melodic targets on Bad Moon Rising, but their tortured yelling serves to redeem it from its depths. Subsequent records include EVOL and Sister, which abandon melodic-sparse music for more aggressive compositions; nonetheless this debut full-length is remarkable work of musical art.
Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd arrived at Abbey Road studios to record their follow-up album to Dark Side Of The Moon exhausted, as their breakthrough album had launched them from underground art rockers into mainstream art rockers, while simultaneously eating up their touring schedule.
Wish You Were Here was an emotive tribute to Syd Barrett who, by the time he appeared in studio to sing it, had become only a shadow of himself.
This song begins with two guitars playing an identical strumming pattern on either guitar. When practicing this part of the song, be sure to do it at a slower speed so you can count out each beat accurately and maintain proper rhythm.