Why do so many play this riff wrong? #4 | The Beatles

picture a lovely sunny spring day after a long cold lonely winter and whilst your bandmates Paul Johnny Ringo have a boring corporate meeting with a record label you're casually hanging out in a garden of Eric Clapton's house that's the setting in which George Harrison wrote here comes the Sun one of the most beautiful guitar parts and songs ever written hi my name is Paul Davis and it's time to dig deeper into why it is so beautiful what techniques are used and why it is pretty complicated to get it down properly this riff is played in the key of a major but it's K code or capo at fret 7 so from now on I refer to the chord shapes instead of the actual coordinates to avoid any confusion so it starts with a D this is for guitar players so we immediately hear that a beautiful lighthearted syncopated melody is played over three chords the D G and a 7 but meanwhile there is an ongoing pulsating rhythm that drives this riff forward at all times let me explain the song actually starts at beat to write a melody line stars the first melody line is played over the default tonic sounding like this [Music] you see it revolves beautifully around that D chord all the notes are within the shape so far so good officer two bars of D were jumping through the G chord the sub-dominant the four chord like D is 1 e is to F sharp is 3 G is for the 4 chord the subdominant chord has a relaxing and soothing sound we're going away from home for the tonic chord the D chord to the G chord but everything is good it's a nice little journey [Music] and on this Court we play this manatee so the notes are very basic but the timing is syncopated falling on the off piece so it's creating an agile almost tiptoeing sounding line the last bar and the last chord is the dominant the five course in this case the a seven the perfect course to end any chord progression with since this court really asks for a resolution it creates tension and it makes us want to go to that D chord really bad tension this is perfectly complemented with the melody on the a7 that walks up right back to the major third of that D chord the starting note again [Music] cool so so far we've got a very basic one four five progression with a rather basic melody on top so what's the deal well apart from the fact that basic and easy are often very solid foundations of great songs for this particular guitar part there are quite some things we need to get right to make it sound as great as George plays it but first shameless plug time finally after a love requests my beginner guitar course learn practice play has opened up again and is now available all year round it's my master class for beginner guitar is that wanna have a solid foundation of everything you need to know either when you're starting out or when you already have some experience but you feel like you're missing some fundamentals or foundation of guitar playing techniques etc so go to a learn practice play calm - check it out thank you so much back - here comes the Sun it's time to talk about the picking hand or shooters say the strumming hand you see in this song it's a bit ambiguous what he's actually doing it hangs a bit in between of strumming and picking and that's also where it can go wrong you can do too much strumming [Music] or too little strumming [Music] the key is to find the balance between strumming the accompaniment quartz and picking the melody on top so we're doing both at the same time because we're singling out the melody notes they get emphasized so you can easily distinguish the melody from the chords it's not entirely as black and white as this though sometimes the melody note is doubled to make it sound a little more full but more on that later another thing to realize is that you incorporate a melody on top of the course so the highest note of the course should be the one of the melody so if the melody goes down to the second string you don't want to strum the first string with it the big problem is that it's almost impossible to write this down correctly in a tab and since most people unfortunately learn by tap the little details are often overlooked you see if you would write all the little nuances in the tab the tab itself would look very crowded and overly complicated and unnecessarily weird because it's just a D chord with a melody on top so if you understand that you don't need to see all the weird stuff at the tap another thing that isn't as easy as it looks is to make a stirring motion and still be so in control that you can play whatever string or strings you need sometimes he plays one notes and sometimes he almost hits an entire chord but it's all done with the same strumming motion like this [Music] etc so try not to make the strumming movement too big since that makes things pretty complicated to get the right strings so another key element of this riff filler notes so the main rhythm of this is just plain eighth notes one and two but the melody doesn't fill all those spots so what your stuffs when the melody isn't playing is always yep no exception filling up those gaps with chord strums in between so this either just a root notes or the root notes string above it so this is the thing people sometimes seem to miss or to leave out at all but it's so essential in creating that ongoing droney feel of this piece so on a D chord he mainly uses the D string as a three note because there isn't much room for because we just have four strings so like this see when a melody isn't playing I'm moving over to the D string all the time on the G chord it's playing the melody on the second and a first string but the bass notes of the courts are found on the low E as well as the a string he plays them together see just jumping up from the low to the highs and on the a7 chords [Music] great and a little bit about the rhythm syncopation the key part of why it sounds so frivolous is the use of syncopation in the melody so if you know the melody which I'm sure you do you can determine when to play the melody and when to play the course in between and I do this personally by always alternating between down and up so all the beats are on the down strum whereas the off beats always fall on the up strong it's pretty easy to look at it this way so on the D chord it is as follows it's just the way the melody places itself on the strums pretty mathematical but also pretty easy so when I didn't say anything in between the downs and ups I play the notes but not the melody but just a court you see that's the way I look at it and you can do that for each court and on the a and thinking about it is more difficult than actually doing it because it's just I do it automatically I don't have to think about it so saying it out loud is actually more difficult than just playing it so you can clearly hear all those syncopated that abuse it sounds beautiful right but that's still not all there is to it because for dynamics there is a broader story in this riff and that's communicated with how loud and how quietly he plays things we talked about it how the tonic and sub-dominant felt comfortable no it's not too much tension just chill but then on the a7 the dominant chord gives a strong sense of going somewhere and he emphasizes that greatly by playing it way louder just listen to the tune [Music] so it's a movement of melody of quartz but also dynamics it makes dis really keeping the strumming motion while singing out the notes the melody notes is a real challenge playing not too light but not too heavy try to capture the airy feeling but still the thrusting forwarding motion of the steady eighth note rhythm so is the entire thing played slowly and then a little more fast [Music] this a sensibly easy riff has a deeper much more complicated layer where there's fine balance between all the elements that makes this riff truly great here comes the Sun please come back looking at the details of such an iconic piece may seem like nitpicking but in the end it's in the details but a difference in slide and when covering a piece like this you don't have to copy it one on one if anything please make something from it yourself add stuff from add stuff to it change it up I don't mind but when you're practicing something and learning a song it's pretty essential to fully grasp what it is you're looking at and what you're hearing all the elements also all the little details are needed to understand and master it completely so now we only talked about pretty small piece of a song basically just the intro further along are some nice arpeggios and some odd time signatures too but to be honest those are in the difficult part of this song not for the guitars anyways I leave it to you from here on out with these handles I'm sure you can get the rest of the tune down have a great day everyone and let me just say it one more time my beginner guitar course is out and available all year round I'm super proud of it it turned out beautifully and I think it fits many players and will be of great value to a lot so more details on that learn practice play comm see you later Cheers

Channel: Paul Davids

Views: 1,695,887

Rating: 4.9128556 out of 5

Keywords: paul davids, guitar, lesson, why do so many play this riff wrong, the beatles, tutorial, strumming, riff, top 10 riffs, harder than you think, video, acoustic guitar, collings, om2h, davids, garden, picking, dynamics, filler notes, how to, acoustic riffs, acoustic songs, best acoustic song, play it wrong, riffs, syncopation, guitar lesson, how to play, classic riff, top 100 riffs, intro, top 20 intros, acoustic intros, intros, top intros

Id: DkLmj4-t34U

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019