|
|
|
|
Your First Song
Let's go over what you know so far:
Let's start making some music. The old folk song "Skip To My Lou" is a great first song to sing and play because it only uses two chords: G Lost my partner what'll I do? D Lost my partner what'll I do? G Lost my partner what'll I do? D G Skip to my Lou my darling. "Skip To My Lou" is in 4/4 time. As we discussed earlier that means we will play four thumb-brush strums in each measure. Each line of "Skip To My Lou" is two measures long. That means each line of the song will get eight thumb-brush strums. All we are going to do here is sing and play the thumb-brush strum. Right now all you really want to do is get used to changing chords, playing the thumb-brush strum and singing at the same time. We will get fancy with this song, and others, later on in the book.
In a chord diagram the strings are laid out 6 5 4 3 2 1. The black dots tell you where to put your fingers and the little number off to the side of some diagrams tells you at what fret to play the chord. The C chord diagram has a little five next to it because, you guessed it, that chord is played at the fifth fret and the D chord has a seven next to it because we play that chord at the seventh fret. For "Skip To My Lou" I have laid out each line of the song into two measures with the quarter note thumb-brush rhythm laid out over the lyrics. If you look at the first line and play a thumb-brush strum for each quarter note you will see that the strums in the first measure fall on certain words, and that there is a single strum after "do?" Tap your foot in a steady 4/4 count while you strum and sing your way through this song. You should be able to get into the flow of it without much fuss. "Skip To My Lou"
Get that smooth and you can start adding more verses: Skip, skip. Skip to my Lou. (3x*) I'll get another one prettier than you, etc. Flies in the buttermilk shoo fly, shoo, etc. Cat's in the cream jar what'll I do, etc. *3x means sing it three times. I guess you could figure that out on your own, but I once heard a guy sing "THREE X!" at a jam session. Spend some time with this song. The first few times you run through it the odds are pretty good that you will have to stop and fish around for a moment before snagging that D chord. Don't knock yourself because everybody goes through that in the beginning. Live with "Skip To My Lou" until you can run through it without speeding up or slowing down the rhythm and the chord changes flow smoothly. It may take a few days or it may take a few weeks. Don't sweat it. Slow and steady wins the race. Once you can play "Skip To My Lou" without any fuss we can move to a slightly more complicated song like "Boil Them Cabbage Down". I know, you are probably wondering what could be so complicated about boiling cabbages? Well, buckle your seatbelts because this is a (gasp!) three-chord song! All kidding aside, throwing another chord into the mix can be a little challenging at first. It is going to take some time to get your right and left hands working together in this song because you have less time between the chord changes. In "Skip To My Lou" we were holding the G for a while, moving to D for a while and back to G. With this new song the chords change more often and the seventh measure has two chords in it. Each chord in the seventh measure is given two beats. So you strum open G and barre-D twice in the seventh measure. Take this one slow and don't forget to sing! "Boil Them Cabbage Down"
Went up on the mountain Someone stole my old coon dog |
|||||||||||||||
| © Stover Mountain Music All Rights Reserved | |
In order to help you visualize the chords for this song and
some of the songs after it we are going to use chord diagrams.
A chord diagram is simply a picture of the fretboard telling you
where to put your fingers. Right now we are only using an open chord
and two barre chords so the diagrams are fairly simple.
