All You Need Is Love by The Beatles Tutorial/Lesson
All You Need Is Love
G, D, Em, Am, D7, D6, A, B7, C
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Video transcript
Hey everyone, my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play All You Need Is Love by The Beatles on the guitar. Today I am featuring my Orangewood Brooklyn guitar. So, if you like what you see, I will link more information about this guitar in the description box down below. I want to give a quick shout out and thank you to my patrons for voting on this song as this month's patron picks. So, if you want a little bit of voting power in the songs that you see me teach here on this channel, make sure to check it out. I will link it in the description box down below. Here's a quick overview of everything I'll be covering in this tutorial today. And with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. All right, guys. So, you need to know nine different chord shapes to play through this song. And we're going to start with our G major, which looks like this and sounds like this. And by the way, if you don't know how to read these chord charts you're seeing on screen, I do cover how to do that my free beginner series right here on YouTube. So, make sure to check that out right here. The next chord shape is our D major. We also have our E minor. Next is our A minor. We also have a few different D variations, including our D7 and our D6. And then we have our A major. There's our B7. And the last chord you need to know is your C major. And those are the nine chords you need to know to play through this song. So go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really memorize these chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them because it'll make learning the rest of the song so much easier. And if this is a skill you're currently struggling with transitioning between your chords fast enough, I do have an entire practice with me playlist right here on my channel where we build this skill up in real time together. So I'll link that in the corner for those of you who need it. But once you come back, we can go ahead and talk about the strumming that I would suggest for this song. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and just throw this out there. I think the hardest part of learning this song is getting the rhythm right because it is a little bit unique and interesting. Um, so the first thing I would suggest doing is if you are a beginner at playing guitar or you're somebody who struggles with playing guitar while singing at the same time, the first thing I would suggest doing is to bring up the song and go ahead and go through the entire thing with just a single downstrum on each chord change as you sing through the song. And you want to take this time to really get used to what word or what syllable you're on whenever those chords are changing. So let's go ahead and use the chorus as an example. It would sound like this. We have All you need is love. Love. is all you need. All right. So, you can even just tell just from doing that how often these chords are changing and things like that. So, it's a really good idea to go ahead and do this step first. And this is actually something you do right now if you check out my Patreon page. I do have this entire guide available to download and print out. So, I'll make sure to leave that link in the description box if you're interested. But once you've done that and you're comfortable with where those chords are going to be changing, then we can go ahead and add to this to do more of a full strumming pattern that you can use for this song. All right, guys. So, like I said earlier, the hardest part I think of learning this song is getting all of the rhythms down right. The reason this song is pretty unique is because we are going to be switching back and forth between two different time signatures throughout the song. Um, so I want to go ahead and start you guys off with the easier time signature that you're probably more used to, which is four time. So in that we have an eighth note pattern on screen. It's just going to be four beats. So it's going to sound like this. We have 1 2 and 3 4 and All right, we've got down, down, up, down, up. What you want to do is when we get to the choruses, which are the majority of the song that's going to be in this four four time, you're going to apply this pattern through one time per chord pairing. So, basically what that means is I'm going to add a vertical line here in the middle and we're going to actually be switching chords in the middle of the measure. So, if you take a look at the chorus, we're starting on our G chord. You would play the left half first. So, we have G down up. Switch to your next chord, A. Finish it out. down, down, up. All right. Same thing with the next two chords. We've got D, down, down, up to D7. Down, down, up. And this is the easiest part of the song because this will be the part that you're probably, you know, able to pick up the rhythm a little more easily. So, we've got G down, up, A, down, up, D, down, up, D7. switching chords in the middle of the measure for all of these. Okay, so just take a second to get used to this. All you need is love. We're going to carry this into that last line of the chorus as well. We've got G, B7, E minor to G to C to D, back to G. All right, so that last line is all you need is love. Love is all you need. All right, so this chorus part of this song is going to probably be the easier part of the song to learn. Yes, we do have a lot more chords in it, but the rhythm is going to be a lot more straightforward as well. So, let's go ahead and go through the entire chorus without stopping. We're basically just playing down, down, up on each of these chords. Okay? All you need is love. Love. is all you need. All right. And on that last G, you can see there I stopped in the middle of the measure because this is going to lead us back to the slightly more confusing rhythm, which is going to be our seven four time. So, if you want to go ahead and pause the video and just practice this chorus with this simple strumming pattern until you kind of get the rhythm down and then we can go ahead and jump into what I think is probably the harder part of this tutorial. So, let's go ahead and jump into the verses. All right, guys. So, for the verses, as you can see, the strumming pattern is a little bit longer, but that's because we have more beats per measure. Okay? So, instead of counting to four earlier, we were going 1 2 and 3 4 and and that was the end of the measure. In the verses, you're actually going to be in seven four times. So, there's going to be seven beats per measure. So, it's going to be like 1 2 and three, four, and five, six, and seven. All right? So, I know that that might be confusing. There's not very many songs that use this time signature. So, this, like I said, is by far the most confusing part. You want to be able to circle this back around and start back at the beginning when you get to the end. And that's the confusing part cuz it's going to feel like you're missing a beat. Okay? So, looking at our verse here, we're starting on our G chord. You're going to play the first part like normal. We've got G down, down, up to D, down, down, up. That's just like the chorus. But here on this E minor, we're gonna do three beats. So we have five, six, and seven. All right. And what I do there is I go down, down, up, up. So I'm kind of doing the offbeat at the end there. Five, six, and and. So again, let's go ahead and start back on our very first line. We've got our G. We've got down, up to D. Down, down, up to E minor. Down, down, up, up. Okay. 1 2 and 3 4 and 5 6 and So, that might feel pretty good, but what's going to happen is we're going to have to start back at the beginning for the next line. So, let me go ahead and play for you through a couple times without stopping. So, you can hear how you're kind of losing a little bit of the beat there. Okay. So, you can hear how it's like it almost feels like you are like if you were trying to tap your foot to this song, it can feel a little bit hard to find the beat. And that's because we have an odd number of beats, which is very unusual. Okay, so this is very based in music theory, which you don't have to know. So just know that we're counting to seven for each of these lines in the verse. Okay? So for the verse we have 1 2 and 3 4 and 5 6 and 7. Again 1 2 and 3 4 and 5 6 and 7. All right. This next line again it goes confusing because this goes back to our four four time. Okay. So this line nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game. This is going to be just like the chorus. So we have a minor down down up to G down up and then on this D chord because it gets a full measure what I like to do is just play down up down up. All right. A minor down up to G down up to D. Down up down up. Okay. And then for the last line it's easy. This is going to go back to that seven four times. So on easy, we've got down, down, up on our D to down, down, up on our D7, down, down, up on our D6, and then this last D is going to get down, up. Okay, I know that this seems very confusing. I do have it written out a little more clearly on the guide that's on my Patreon page, but basically, you just have to get used to going back and forth between the different time signatures. Okay. So, let's go ahead and go through the entire verse without stopping. We've got G, D, E minor. All right, that was a whole round through the verse with some singing. It sounds like this. There's nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can sing that can't be. Nothing you can say. You can learn how to play the game. It's easy. There's nothing you can make that can't be made. All right. So, you can hear how at the end of it's easy. We're going straight into the next part of the verse. Okay. So again, it's going to feel a little maybe like rushed or like you're losing a beat. And that's exactly because with our typical music that we listen to, you kind of are. Okay. So it's easy. Down, up. There's nothing you can make that can be made. Nothing you can save. Four more times. But you can learn how to be in time. It's easy. down, up, straight to the chorus. Need is love. And the chorus should kind of feel like home to you. Like when you get to the chorus, it should be kind of easier to count and everything like that. So if you're new to playing guitar or just music in general, this rhythm and this um time signature can be pretty tough to get used to. The Beatles were actually really known for, you know, playing around with things like this. So definitely if you want to start with an easier song, I'll have some suggestions. listed in the comments. But like I said, the actual strumming and the chords for this song are not too hard. It's just getting used to kind of counting out the rhythm. So again, take as much time as you need to practice it, especially those verses that switch back and forth between time signatures. It took me a little while to kind of get used to it. Play along with the song if you need to. Uh I also have my playalong that has all of it listed on there. So again, there's lots of different ways to practice this, but the most important thing is just getting that countdown. All right, guys. So again, go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really look over these different strumming rhythms. I know it's pretty confusing, but you'll have to just understand that there's different time signatures, and because of that, you have to know different ways to strum the pattern. If you are unfamiliar with just strumming rules with guitar in general, I would highly recommend checking out my beginner series because I do break that down over there about how we're supposed to strum and therefore how you can like kind of create your own strumming patterns, things like that. So definitely check it out if you need help with it. Um, but once you have that under your belt, then we can go ahead and put everything we've learned together in this tutorial, the chords, the transitions, the strumming, put it all together to play through the song. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 love. There's nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can sing that song. Want to have fun jamming out to the rest of this song with me? Yeah. >> Then make sure to check out my Patreon page where you can unlock access to this as well as all my other fast track and play along guitar tutorials. I'll make sure to leave a link for it in the description box down below. If you enjoyed learning this song with me, then you should definitely check out this video. Not only does it have a super similar vibe and feel, but it's just as fun and easy to play. So, see you over there. Bye.