Top 5 BEST Campfire Guitar Songs - 4 Chords or Less!

hey it's james here from goodguitarist.com and we're in the peak of summer here in vancouver canada so i figured it would be a great time to show you five super easy songs that you can play around the campfire that use the same four chords or even less and throughout this lesson i'll also have some tips for remembering the songs and being able to confidently play through the whole thing when the time actually comes and before we get into it i just want to show you something this is what you get when you print off the chords and lyrics online three big pages to one of the songs that we're going to be doing today and sure that works but one gust of wind and your chances of getting all the way through the tune if you're relying on that you know those three sheets of paper that goes into the campfire so during this lesson i'm gonna show you how to write these songs down out in the easiest way like you could even write it down on your arm like this or if you're like me and the words to the song aren't really your strong point you can put it all on one page like this and just have the chords in the corner and that is way more manageable you know i'm one of those people myself that i don't have the easiest time remembering lyrics so i chose these songs specifically because a lot of people do know the lyrics so you can kind of just start playing the simple like you know whatever four chords there and you know there's a pretty good chance that somebody else is going to chime in and start singing or you know they could pull up the lyrics on their phone i also made sure that the songs are fairly easy to remember you know the order of the chords is easy to remember because there's a lot of songs even though they're just three chords they kind of change in like almost a random order you know and at really strange times and that makes it really hard to keep track so these ones are all super straightforward everything's just like for that for that done you know um really repetitive and easy to get through and everybody loves these songs so let's just jump right in the first song i want to show you is sweet home alabama big wheels keep on turning carrying me songs about southland miss alabama once again where the [Music] skies lord i'm coming home to you so that's sweet home alabama and it's been slightly simplified there's like a couple chord shots and stuff that when you play with a whole band is super cool but if you're just playing around a campfire all you need is three chords i it's this one right here d c g g so for the d chord it's just a straight up d chord and then for c you can play a normal c chord or from d you lift up these two fingers your index and your middle and then you put your middle finger on the third fret where it goes at the root of the c chord and then your index on the second fret of d so third fret of the a string second fret of the d string and that makes c add nine and that's what they do on the recording and what's really cool about this is when you go to switch into g you just move those two fingers up and then you add your pinky and you get your g chord so those are the three chords that we're using for this one and as far as the order we play our strumming pattern one time on d and the strumming pattern goes root root down down up root just means like a little down stroke you know you don't have to be too picky you don't have to get the exact root you just aim somewhere in here and you just go one two and then on three [Music] strum them all and then on four down up so we divide it into beats like that b one is a root b two is a root b three is a full down stroke and b four is a down up and that'll help you with the feeling of the song you know so we do that one time on d then we switch to our c chord you can do the regular c chord or c add 9. i put my middle finger a little bit higher so that it mutes the thickest string and that way i can kind of just aim wherever with my strumming and i can keep my strumming nice and loose and we do our strumming pattern one time on c and then two times on g and that's it that's the whole thing [Music] you see that over and over again you know just this this progression right here when it comes to writing it out what i like to do is i print the lyrics so you know i'll just put them on the side here you can see the lyrics for this tune and you know it's usually too long for a single page so i take the choruses because they're all the same and i just i keep the first chorus i make it bold and then i take the rest of the choruses and i replace them just with the word chorus just to remind me of what's going on and then in the corner i write out my little i call this a chord grid and you basically write out the chord symbol every time you do the strumming pattern on it so we have d strumming pattern one time on d strumming power one time on c then we're doing our strumming pattern twice on g so we write out g two times and that's what chord and lyric sheets when you just go on like ultimate guitar that's what they're missing you know they don't really tell you how many times to do the strumming pattern for but this just fixes that and then you have the lyrics on one side you have the chords on the other side done um you know it is good to like learn the words but if that's where you're at if you just want to focus on playing guitar let somebody else handle the words that's it that's all you need now when it comes to the mechanics of playing you know like being confident with your chord shapes and your strumming pattern i am going a little bit faster in this one because we're covering a lot of material if you do need help with breaking it all down i have a ton of lessons dedicated to that i have a free ebook it's completely free for all my subscribers i'll put a link in the corner that goes over all the fundamentals of guitar it's something it's up to like over 60 pages at this point you know and it just has everything you need to get started all the chords strumming chord switching all that stuff so please get your copy if you haven't yet otherwise we're gonna move on to our second days song the rains came down skipping and jumping in the misty morning fog with our hearts are bumping you a brown-eyed girl that's brown eyed girl by van morrison and you know this is one of the most classic songs if you've ever been to a wedding you've heard this song before you know it's like uh still in rotation like 50 years later as far as the components it uses all four of the chords that we're going to be doing today the first section just uses three it goes g [Music] c and then g d [Music] so i just think of it in like two bits g c g d and we do it with the most common strumming pattern ever down down up miss up down up down down up miss up down up it really helps if you say it miss [Music] once again we're going really fast here because we have a lot of stuff to go through if you need help with that i have a lesson covering the most common strumming pattern ever and all the chords and stuff like like i mentioned or in my ebook my complete beginners course has that stuff to like you know way more in depth so definitely check that out anyways back to our subject at hand the verse for this one we're gonna do the strumming pattern one time on each chord g c g d and we do that a few times i think like four times and then we work our way into the chorus and this is a bit longer than the other parts for the chorus it's c d g e minor and then we start that again c d g but instead of e minor we play d and that's the entire chorus you know that those eight chords in a row so for this one i definitely recommend writing out one of those chord grids you know once again you print off the lyrics and then in the corner you draw out your chord grid like this and that's you know your verse on the top your chorus underneath that's another one that you can add to your collection our third song and the land is the only light we see [Music] just as long as you stand by me so darling stand by me stand behind me stand by me [Music] and that one is just the same eight measures over and over again here's what it looks like on our chord grid so we play our strumming pattern two times on g two times on e minor c d and then two times on g and the strumming for every song here on out is the same one that we did for brown eyed girl you know the most common strumming pattern ever down down up up down up and yeah we just play our strumming pattern one time per each chord there and that's how you would do stand by me and once again print that off write out the those chords in the corner and you have one piece of paper that has everything you need and ideally you're going to run through these tunes a whole bunch of times with your chord sheets but then i want you to put them away and see if you can do it without them you know i think that's a really important step because ultimately you want to be in the moment not in the paper and you know you want to be feeling it out with all the people around you your friends family whoever it is that you're hanging out with and if you're lost in the page they'll still have a good time and it'll be awesome don't get me wrong you'll still be doing a great job but you should have a great time too and you know these songs they're simple enough that with a little bit of work you can totally get through them without the page i know for me personally as long as i can kind of remember the first like couple words of each section i'll be able to get the rest of it you know for me that's usually good enough so sometimes you could even just write that down on your chord grid or even on like a little post-it note and put it on top of your guitar you know make your little cheat sheet and that's a good strategy to kind of like wean yourself off of having the whole page because like i showed you at the beginning of this you know when you have your like three pages it's just so cumbersome and it just gets in the way of it right and uh i get that having the songs completely memorized is like a whole big thing so there's kind of that all those little spaces in between you know to work your way up into that to make it a lot simpler and uh and more manageable our fourth campfire tune heading down south to the land of the pines i'm thumbing my way down north carolina staring up the road and prayed i got i see headlights made it down the coast for 17 hours picking me a bouquet of dogwood [Music] once again same four chords same strumming pattern the chord order for this one you can see it right there in the corner as i demonstrated before i printed this all off onto one sheet put that in the corner there you go so this is a really fun one and once again it's the same thing over and over again out of all these brown eyed girl is the most complicated it's the only one that has different sections at all the rest of them is just like that one section over and over you might wanna do a swing feel for the strumming pattern that's one of the different things instead of doing it straight like [Music] you know where it's like completely mechanical and taken away you do longer down strokes you know it has that like [Music] that blues feel but aside from that it's really straight forward so that's another tune that you can get with these same four chords and strumming pattern and the final song that i want to show you [Music] the reason things went wrong i got to find a reason why my moms and that one is my personal pick out of this whole one you know um normally i like to do popular songs or whatever but for me this song reminds me of graduating elementary school i was in like grade seven and my brother had just got his car and he just got this album and we like drove to mcdonald's and they used to sell hamburgers for like 30 cents each or something on some promotion and we bought like a mountain of them and it was like the first day of summer and uh you know so this one is is a special one to me and as far as the the chords and everything are concerned it's just the same two chords back and forth it's just a d chord and a g chord it's the same strumming pattern that we've been using this entire time but something that you can do to spice it up and make it feel a bit more like the original recording is instead of strumming all the strings when you're doing it which is cool you know i would do that at some point during the song but you can start off going with the same motions doing it really small like you can see i have my hand kind of touching the guitar here so i go like down down and then i go up on the b string that's the trick with this one is doing your first upstroke on the b string and then your second upstroke on the g string and then for all the down strokes just making them really small b g see i'm doing that i'm just down down and then up on b up on g and then finishing off the pattern and we can cut out that last up stroke you know and that makes it feel like the tune i'll do it super slowly and this one i don't even think you need to write out the chords just remember that you play d first and then g and that's all there is to it one time per chord get through the entire song there's like other cool stuff like [Music] and i'm like 95 sure that i've already taught that in another lesson i'll put that in the corner if i haven't i'll make the lesson soon because it's a super cool guitar part either way those are my top five campfire songs if there's a tune that you think i should have done please let me know in the comments down below and i can maybe do another one of these in the future also if you'd like some help with the basics don't forget to check out my free ebook which will help you with everything that you need to become a confident strummer i also have my complete beginners course which does that but it guides you through it every step of the way and i'll include a link for that too if you're interested otherwise have a fun time practicing and i'll see you soon you

Channel: Good Guitarist

Views: 436,040

Keywords: campfire guitar, campfire song, how to play campfire songs, play campfire songs on guitar, campfire guitar songs for beginners, beginner campfire guitar, easy campfire songs acoustic guitar, campfire guitar songs, essential campfire guitar songs, top 10 campfire songs

Id: ix9z6CLgc5w

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2022