Guitar songs with just two chords

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Here's the video transcript:

What's the point in playing songs that have just two or three chords? Isn't it better to learn as many chords as possible so you that can become a great guitarist sooner?

Well, in my experience, getting too hungry to learn new chords is often the way beginner guitarists hold themselves back in their development.

With upwards of 40,000 chord shapes playable on the guitar, you are never going to use more than a tiny fraction of available chords over your guitar-playing career!

What will really make a difference to how good you sound as a guitarist is HOW you use chords. And the best way to develop quality of sound, and all the little details of technique that go towards lending your playing real finesse, is to play songs with very few chords so that you are forced to focus in on how you make those chords sound.

So, in this lesson, I'm going to introduce you to two completely different songs that each use just two chords.

Here's a great song from the early seventies - A Horse With No Name by the three-piece band America. The first chord is a straight forward Em, probably best played with second and third fingers to make the change to the second chord easier 3.

The second chord is a version of D with the note F# in the bass. You might hear this called a first inversion D major or perhaps more commonly simply D slash F# or D over F#. And that's all there is to the chords - hard to think of anything easier! But there is quite a bit more to the strumming hand. The distinctive rhythm of the song comes partly from a two bar pattern that uses a bit of bass note separation and muting technique.

Notice how bar 1 starts with the bass note hit separately and also how the emphasis switches to the upstrokes in the second bar of each pair. This sort of rhythm is deceptively hard for beginners to get, but I can tell you that it doesn't help to try and be too exact in how you copy it. Rather, I recommend 'homing in on it' by experimenting and careful listening.

The only other tip I'll leave you with on this song is that the muting, is best achieved with both hands, palm muting at the strumming end...And a tiny bit of gripping and relaxing of the chord shape at this end as well
Note this isn't lifting the fingers off the strings - it's relaxing the fingers so that the strings just come away from the fret wires that kills the sound neatly.

My second choice of song for this lesson is an old blues tune written by Ellington Jordan and first recorded by Etta James in the mid sixties

It's called 'I'd rather Go Blind'

The chords are G and Am . Please note that if you want to play along to the original recording which is in A, you'll need a capo at fret two to make it sound in tune.

We're playing this in 6/8 time which is counted as two lots of three like this.
123 456...123 456 though you may find it easier to think of each bar as two beats. It's fine to count it 1 and a 2 and a..

The beauty of a slow song like this is that there is plenty of space for you to experiment with ornamentation and a real chance for you to begin to develop some individual style to your playing.

Here are a few ideas that I have found have crept into the way I might play this.

So, in answer to our title question: 'What's the point in playing songs with really simple chord sequences?' You can perhaps see how once your attention can come off the problem of constantly trying to remember what chord shape comes next, and how best to play that shape; you begin to listen more to what you are playing. By concentrating on the sound, you naturally find yourself developing real guitar playing skills that you can then carry forward into the more complex chord sequences at a later stage.