Breathe by Taylor Swift Tutorial/Lesson
Breathe
G, Cadd9, Dsus4, Em7
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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 breathe taylor's version by taylor swift featuring colby coulee on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something that you'd like to learn and guys today's video is a little bit more special because i am pairing up with my friend katie over at one music school to kind of do a little bit of a joint tutorial for you guys so if you are a little bit more of a beginner and you want to do capo 6 with these four chords and just focus on simple strumming patterns make sure to stay tuned here but if you are someone who's a little bit more advanced check out katie's channel where she'll be teaching you how to play this song with kpo1 and these chords and she'll do picking and things like that so definitely make sure to check out her tutorial as well she's very similar to me as far as personalities if you like the way that i do my tutorials you'll love the way that she does hers and she's got tons on her channel on top of that she kind of also goes more into like music theory and things like that so if that's something that you're interested in i would totally recommend checking her out i will link her channel in the description box below as well as the i card right up here so this song is going to be super beginner friendly to start you want to make sure your capo is on the sixth fret in order to play it in the original key as taylor swift's version and then on top of that i'm only going to show you four chords today they're all open no bar chords to play through the entire song as well as three strumming patterns that kind of go back and forth between the song so with that being said let's go ahead and jump into how to play those chords alright guys so like i said we only need to know four chord shapes to play through the entire song and we're gonna start with our g chord which looks like this and sounds like this and by the way if you don't know how to read these chord charts that you're seeing on screen you can check out my beginner series episode three where i go all through how to read those and things like that um after that we have our second chord which is our c add 9 chord for that you just want to take these top two fingers move them each down one string and rc9 looks like this and sounds like this after that we're gonna need our d suspended four chord which looks like this and sounds like this and then the last chord shape you need to know is our e minor 7 which looks like this and sounds like this and those are the only four chords you need to know to play the song so if you're new to guitar i would recommend to go ahead and pause the video and just memorize these chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them a few times it'll make playing through the whole song a lot easier for you but after you've done that let's go ahead and jump into the strumming patterns that i'd like to use for this song those of you familiar with my channel will already know what's up but i'm going to start you guys off with a simple practice pattern which is just one simple down strum on the beat for every chord change i always recommend beginners start out here because it's a really great way to get used to the song and to know where those transitions are going to be so basically all you want to do is one simple down strum for every chord change that you see so at the beginning we've got g to d suspended to c at nine and i'm not kidding that's actually most of the song there so as long as you can transition smoothly between g to d to c at nine you should be okay so basically after you have those transitions down i just want you to go through the song and practice singing the words and pairing that with your single down strum so that you can get used to where those chords are going to change so for example if we did verse 1 so even just by doing this you can tell things like the cd9 we're holding for like two kind of measures whereas the g and d suspended four are just for one that's all stuff that you'll figure out when you do the single down stream so i would recommend pausing the video and going ahead to go through the whole song i have a printable guide over on my patreon page that you can easily do this with so make sure to check that out if you're interested but after that's done let's go ahead and jump into our first real strumming pattern alright guys so the first strumming pattern as you can see is down down down down up and it's going to sound a little something like this so let's start out by just putting our g chords on and i want you to play this rhythm with me i'll count us in one two ready go down down up down down down down so basically once you can hear that rhythm and you kind of internalized it a little bit all you want to do now is pair that with some of these chord transitions so remember when we did our practice pattern that we're holding out our cd9 for two measures so that's going to follow through with this pattern as well you'll see g is going to be once down down down down up d suspended is also once down down down down up but then on c add nine you're gonna hold through this pattern two times all right so the whole thing is gonna sound like this i see your face all right nice and so you could use this pattern for the entire song if you wanted to and just remember that whenever you're holding out a chord you would just double up on this pattern but i did want to show you a second strumming pattern and then i'll show you how we can combine them but first of all let's go through a strumming pattern too alright guys so as you can see a strumming pattern two is down up down down up and it's going to sound a little something like this so hopefully you're able to hear it's very similar to strumming pattern one but it's kind of filling in a little bit more of that empty space so let's go ahead and put our g chords on and just give that a try i'm gonna count us in and i want you to jump in whenever you're comfortable and we're just staying on g one two ready go down down down up down down down all right awesome remember if you need more time to pause the video and practice that on your own for a few more minutes but basically once you can internalize that rhythm it's very similar to strumming pattern one where we're just going to hold it one time through for each chord unless there are chords where you're holding it for two measures such as cn9 so again let me put all of this on screen so basically your g chord is going to be going through this pattern one time down up down down down up then we go to our d suspended four we do this one time down up down down down up then on our c add9 chord we're going to hold this out for two measures so we're repeating it twice down up down down down up again all right so again if you put all of that together without stopping it would sound like this twice i see your face awesome now again if you need a little bit more practice time on any of this make sure to pause the video and practice for a few minutes on your own until you can kind of internalize those rhythms but what i like to actually do in my cover is i will combine strumming pattern one and strumming pattern two so basically what happens is i will alternate between strumming pattern one and two for each measure so a second ago we practiced this um chord progression with strumming pattern one then we practiced it with strumming pattern two but what i actually think sounds really good is when you mix and match okay so for our g chord we're gonna do strumming pattern one down down down up then you go to your next chord which is d suspended four and go to strumming pattern two down up down down down up then go to your c add nine and we're gonna start on strumming pattern one down down down down up and then go to strumming pattern two down up down down down up all right so you can either think of combining these as one big strumming pattern or you can just think of it as alternating between the two strumming patterns so the whole thing's gonna be like this on our g chord we've got down down down down up to d suspended down up down down strumming pattern one strumming pattern two strumming pattern one strumming pattern two g d suspended i see your face all right so hopefully you can hear how when you alternate between those patterns it kind of just fills the pattern in a little bit more makes the guitar part sound a little bit more interesting however if that does seem like really intimidating to you or it's like really confusing feel free to just use strumming pattern one for the whole song or strumming pattern two for the whole song or if you need to you can just do the single down strum for the whole song what's important here is that you're having fun learning this song all right guys and we're almost out of the woods i did have one last strumming pattern i wanted to show you which was strumming pattern three and as you can see it is just eight down strums and it's gonna sound like this now i would say that this strumming pattern is not as important as strumming patterns one and two you can basically play through the whole song with just those two strumming patterns however there are places in the song where taylor kind of builds it up a little bit leads into like a different section or something like that and that's where i would use this strumming pattern so basically we want to use it towards the ends of like phrasings and stuff like that and all you want to do it's as simple as it looks we're just going to do eight down strums on a single chord so let's go ahead and put our g chord on to practice and we're just gonna strum down eight times one two three four five six seven all right that's the strumming pattern it's super simple what matters here is where you're going to kind of strategically place this strumming pattern between the other ones alright guys so the first place that i would recommend using this eight down strum pattern is at the end of each pre-chorus when she sings you're the only thing i know like the back of my hand all right so we're gonna start on our sea at nine you're the only thing i here on the know hand we're gonna go to our d suspended four chord now you could just hold out strumming pattern one or two if you wanted to but i think it sounds really great when we build up the suspense by doing the eight down four strums six seven eight like the back of my head then i can't and then you go into the chorus right so let me do the whole end of the pre-chorus for you so you can kind of hear how that sounds and then it just keeps going but um basically that's the first place i would recommend using the eight down strums because we're kind of building into the chorus the other place that i think it'll sound really good is when we get to the bridge so for the bridge that's when taylor's singing it's 2 a.m feeling like i just lost a friend this is the section of the song that's a little bit different than the rest of it and it's a really great place to use this third strumming pattern so let me go ahead and put the chords here on screen what we're going to do is just play through this pattern one time through for each of these chords so starting on our e minor seven we have down down down down down c at nine five six seven eight g two three four five six seven eight to be suspended easy all right so i think it'll sound really great there to sneak in some strumming pattern three however like i said you could use strumming pattern one or two or the combo for the entire song but i think it if you add this in strategically it does kind of build up suspense throughout the song just makes the guitar sound a little bit more interesting so feel free to you know put that in there in your cover um however we have gone through all of the strumming patterns that i wanted to show you for this song so now let's go ahead and put everything we learned together to play through the song one two ready go see your face want to have fun jamming out to the rest of this song with me 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 tutorials or you can also check out katie's channel where we will be doing a joint cover play-along tutorial version over there so i will link that in the i-card up here as well as in the description box below all right guys but that does end my tutorial today i really hope that it helped if it did make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well as subscribe to my channel that way you never miss out on any other new tutorials huge thank you to all my patrons for supporting the channel and making videos like this one possible and special shout out to my top patrons whose names are listed on screen right now you guys are awesome here are my social media sites in case you'd like to follow me on any of those that's just where i do fun stuff like behind the scenes looks at things coming up i'll pull you guys on what you want to learn next and i'll even do giveaways on there a few times a year so make sure to check it out also don't forget to check out katie's channel for a different variation of how to play this song as well as our joint cover over there but with that being said that does it for the video so thank you so much for watching i really hope that it helped and i will see you in my next video bye you