Celestial by Ed Sheeran Tutorial/Lesson
Celestial
G, Bm, D, A
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Video transcript
foreign my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play Celestial by Ed Sheeran on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something that you'd like to learn but really quick before we jump into the tutorial I wanted to take a second to thank today's sponsor and your music I will actually be using their Nova go carbon fiber travel guitar in this video today and if you are watching this the day it's released or the day after they are having a sale on this on Amazon and you can get 20 off all of their Nova go guitars so I will make sure to put the details of that in the description box down below as well as link it in this icard right up here but with that being said let's go ahead and jump into the tutorial all right guys so I am going to label this as more of a beginner slash intermediate song mostly because of the strumming but first of all let's talk about our guitar you will need it to be in standard tuning and you do not need a capo to play the song in its original key I only have four cores to show you today for the whole song however one of them is a bar chord which is B minor which is what excuse this kind of more towards the intermediate level player and I also have three strumming patterns to show you today and I'm going to show them to you from like easiest to hardest you can kind of build your skills up to you know what I would suggest um but with all of that being said let's go ahead and start the tutorial off with the chords alright guys so I've gone ahead and zoomed in a little to take a closer look at these chords like I said there are only four to play through the whole song and we're going to start with our G 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 I Do cover how to do that in my beginner series episode 3 so I will make sure to link that right here for those of you who need it the next chord is our bar chord which is B minor after that you need to know your D chord and the last chord is our a chord before chords to play through this song Alright guys so like I always say if you are new to guitar make sure to pause the video right now and take a few moments to memorize those chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them one of the best things about this song is that the order that I just showed you those chords in G B minor d and a is actually the chord progression for the entire song so as long as you can be really sufficient in like transitioning in this order you should be able to play through the whole song no problem so make sure to take the time to do that but once you have we can go ahead and talk a little bit more about the strumming all right guys I'm going to start you off with the easiest strumming pattern which is strumming pattern one and as you can see it's just a single down strum and you want to do that for every chord change this is going to be really great for those of you who struggle with rhythm or are new to strumming things like that it's also a great way for those of you who want to sing and play the guitar to kind of get used to the song and where those transitions are so let's go ahead and bring up the chorus here on screen so I can kind of just show you how this would look so basically all you want to do is go through the entire song sink through it and then change those chords whenever they change so for example with the chorus you make me feel like my troubled heart is a million miles away all right basically just like that through the entire song just make sure you're really familiar with what word you're singing whatever those chords are transitioning that'll make learning these other strumming patterns so much easier and this is actually something you can do right now if you visit my patreon page I do have this entire guide available right now so you can print it out and practice through it but once you've done that let's go ahead and talk about strumming pattern too Alright guys so we're stepping it up a notch for strumming pattern two however it's still not that hard as you can see it's just down up mute down and it's going to sound like this so a closer breakdown of how that pattern works is let's go ahead and put our G chords on what you want to do is strum down and then on your way back up you want to take the side of your strumming hand and just kind of mute the string so you're going down up mute so as you're going up you just circle back around and meet those strings down down mute all right really quick that whole action so then you just follow it up with another down strum so the whole thing goes like this down up and down and you're gonna let that last down ring mute down and that's the whole pattern so again you just want to play this pattern one time through for each of those chords so let's go ahead and put the chord progressions up on screen for your G chord you're going to go down a mute down then you go to your B minor chord down a mute down then D down a mute down and then a down a mute down all right and if this is kind of where you are and able to handle with your Rhythm then this can be applied for the entire song Let's go ahead and bring up the chorus again so I can kind of show you how that goes together so again you're going G B minor to D to a you make me feel like my troubled heart is still and then you just repeat that over like I said earlier you could apply this for the entire song and it would sound pretty good one other thing I wanted to show you is if this is kind of more where you're comfortable with rhythm another thing that you could do to easily dress this up is just kind of repeat that down up mute pattern so instead of just down a mute down you would do it twice so down a mute down a mute down all right so see how we're kind of just repeating that first half again down a mute down a mute down down up down up down all right so if you can do it once you can definitely do it twice um so that's just kind of a way to fill in some of that space so if you were to double it up the whole thing would sound like this we've got G to be minor to D to a and again you could repeat that for the entire song as well it sounds pretty good and it like kind of fills in all of that space however the strumming pattern that I would suggest you try out that sounds the most like the original song is going to be the third strumming pattern so let's go ahead and talk about strumming pattern three all right guys so this last strumming pattern is going to be the most challenging rhythmically and as you can see it's down up up down down up and the whole thing is going to sound like this foreign so that speed that I just did the Rhythm at is about the speed that you want to be able to eventually play this song at to match Ed Sheeran's song however let's go ahead and just slow it down a bit to kind of break it up a little bit more and this pattern you just want to play one time for each chord so on our G chord let's go ahead and break this down we have down up up down up you can kind of hear how we're holding out those down strums down up up down up down down up all right so let's go ahead and do that for a few measures and I want you to jump in and try to match this strumming pattern with me down up up down up up down down up down up up down up up down down we're just staying on our G chord trying to get used to this rhythm up up down up up down down up down up up down down all right so if you need a little bit more practice make sure to rewind and just practice that part over and over again until you really internalize that Rhythm and then once you have it down what we want to do now is add in those chord transitions so let me go ahead and put those on screen again remember you're just doing this whole pattern through one time for each chord so on G we have down up up down up up down down up to our B minor down up up down up up down down up to D down up up down up up down down up to a down up up down up up down down up foreign nice so once you get that Rhythm down all you want to do now is speed it up until you can get it at full Tempo now fair warning this song does move really quickly so I think one of the most challenging parts of this song is being able to play the strumming pattern at the original Tempo however with enough practice you should totally be able to get there so eventually at full Tempo it'll sound more like this foreign all right so much faster however I promise if you put in that practice time it'll get a lot more natural for you and so once you can get it at Tempo this is actually the strumming pattern that I think sounds the most like how Ed Sheeran plays it in his actual song um so you could apply this for the entire thing if you wanted to however the last thing I wanted to show you is how you can add a palm mute to kind of make it sound more percussive a little bit more rhythmic and this is a really great way to kind of dress up your guitar without really changing anything so with the Palm you all I'm doing is taking the side of my hand here and resting it really gently on my strings close to where the bridge is and so now when you strum you can kind of hear how it has that more percussive like drummy kind of sound all right so it doesn't ring out as much and that's perfect because that's a really good way for you to distinguish between like different parts of the song so the way that I would use this is to Palm mute like the verses and the pre-courses and then let the choruses ring and that'll make the guitar part sound a lot more interesting and just a lot more fun to jam on let's go ahead and just bring up the chorus another time and I'll show you how you can put all of this together to play through that chorus one two ready go you make me feel like a trunk on stars all right and then we keep going like that as well um like I said if you wanted to add in that Palm mute I do think it sounds really good with the verses so let me go ahead and put up first one just to give you an example so remember the chords and the strumming pattern are exactly the same all we're doing is adding that Palm mute so that'll sound more like this G D minor foreign and then you would just keep going so again this last strumming pattern I think is definitely the most applicable to this song so if you can practice your way up there and make sure you get those rhythms down then you can play it for the entire song but with all that said let me go ahead and show you how I put this all together by playing through the song so let's go ahead and jump into the playthrough we are designed to love and break into it's and repeat it all again Wanna Have Fun jamming to the rest of the 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 I'll make sure to leave a link in the description box down below as well as in this icard right up here alright guys but that ends my tutorial so thank you so much for watching if it helped you make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well subscribe to my channel that way you never miss out on any other new tutorials another thank you goes out to any music for sponsoring today's video if you are interested in checking out their carbon fiber travel guitars make sure to take advantage of that sale that's going on for the next 48 hours I'll have all the links and details in the description box down below I want to give a special shout out to all of my top patrons over on my patreon page I will have all of their names listed on screen right now as well as a huge thank you to all of my patrons for supporting my channel and making videos just like this impossible 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 things 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 few times a year so make sure to check it out but that ends the video today so thank you so much for watching I really hope that it helped and I will see you in my next one coming out really soon thank you