Deja Vu by Olivia Rodrigo Tutorial/Lesson
Deja Vu
D, A
Download Printable Guitar Guide
Unlock with Patreon
Watch play along cover
Unlock with Patreon
Practice with my Backing Track
Unlock with Patreon
Are you new to playing the guitar? Watch my free Beginner Series where I show you all of the basics. You'll be playing your first songs in minutes!
Video transcript
hey everyone my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play Deja Vu by Olivia Rodrigo on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something You' like to learn so this song is going to be super great if if you're a beginner first of all we are in standard tuning and you do not need a CBO to play this song in the original key but the best part of it is that this entire song can be played with only two chords and neither of them are bar chords so it's great for if you're a beginner and I have two strumming patterns as well as one picking pattern that I want to show you but of course that picking pattern is always optional that's just there if you are a little bit more advanced or like to go into picking but you could totally do this whole song with just the struming patterns as well so let's go ahead and jump into it and I will show you those chords say you're so unique all right guys and like I said there's only two chords for this entire song the first chord you're going to need to know is D which looks like this and sounds like this and then the other chord you need to know is a which looks like this and sounds like this and something to notice here too is like you can play this entire song with just those two chords but there is something that you can do to dress it up really easily is when you're playing your D chord taking off your middle finger okay so then that sounds like this all right so there's going to be a lot of back and forth between D and middle finger off and then the same can be said about your a chord so this is our normal a chord but another easy way to dress it up is just to make your ring finger take your ring finger off okay so then it goes into this right so you're going to go back and forth between a with your ring finger a all right so those are the chords you need to know for this song all right so once you have those cord fingerings down the rest of the song is so easy because it literally just goes back and forth between d and a and so it's really easy for Transitions and things like that once you get that transition down but if you need to go ahead and pause the video and make sure you can transition pretty easily between DNA because that way it'll make the whole song go a lot easier um but with that being said let's go ahead and jump into the strumming patterns that I want to show you for this song do you call her Almost Say My Name all right so the very first strumming pattern I have to show you is super simple all it is is four down strums so let's go ahead and start out with our decord on and what I want you to do is just strum down four times 1 2 3 4 but the thing that we're going to do to kind of change this up and make it sound a lot more like the original and kind of make it a little more fun is when you're strumming down I want you to go ahead and take your middle finger on your D chord on your left hand and just lift it off and what I'm doing there is I'm kind of flicking the string a little bit with the tip of my middle finger all right so without playing anything on your right hand you should be able to hear this sound so I call this like a hammer on is when you Hammer your finger on and then I flick off my finger to make that sound all right and what you're going to do is you're going to do that with your middle finger as we do our four down strums so now it'll become more like this all right so we've got 1 2 3 4 all right and notice again with my left hand I'm not doing anything all I'm doing is lifting my middle finger and kind of flicking the string as I come off all right and you just do that over and over again 1 2 3 4 all right and so when you go to the a chord it's the exact same thing except this time instead of your middle finger I want you to flick off your ring finger your third finger I'm not doing anything with my right hand all right so we're just doing that with our left hand but the strumming pattern is going to stay the same you just do four down strums okay 1 2 3 4 awesome so then what you want to do is just put the D and the a together so we with the hammer on flick off motion and I actually want you to do each of those chords twice so for D we've got 1 2 3 4 again 1 2 3 four then you go to your a chord and then you're going to do the four down strum pattern twice again 1 2 3 4 twice 1 2 3 4 all right and then you can literally play the entire song just like that right to malibo strawberry ice cream one spoon for two all right so that is the first strumming pattern I do have something to tell you guys though if that's a little bit hard for you to do that like flick off hammeron motion another thing you can do to kind of get around that instead of doing that is whenever you are strumming down on your like whole D chord so all three fingers are down you can then just take off your middle finger and then strum up so instead of doing the hammer on flick off motion you can just strum up with your middle finger off all right so we've got down all three fingers take your middle finger and up so then in that case if you would prefer doing that it would just become a down up down up strumming pattern so it' be like this down up down up down up down up all right and then again it would be the exact same thing for your a chord you're just going to strum down with your entire a chord on then lift up your ring finger and strum up all right so we've got down up and then you just do that for the whole measure down up down up down up down all right so again you just put that together strawberry ice cre spoon for two and trating and then you just keep going so again that is just kind of like a little easier way to get around and have that exact same Rhythm without doing the hammer on and flick offs and things like that but with that being said let's go ahead and jump into the second string pattern I want to show you for this song So as you can see the second strumming pattern that I wanted to show you for this is the very common down down up up down up and it's going to sound a little something like this so that was the Rhythm there let's go ahead and practice that with our decordon I'm just going to play it through a a few times and count it off and you guys just go ahead and jump in with me whenever you feel ready 1 2 3 4 down down up up down up down down up up down up down down up down up awesome so as you can see that is the Rhythm and you would keep this entire rhythm going for the entire song but now what we want to do is kind of put in that variation back okay so we have our regular D chord on right now with all three fingers and what I want you to do is play this regular D chord for the first two down strums so we've got down then I want you to lift your middle finger and then do the rest of the pattern up up down up all right so again that's down down lift up up down up awesome so let's just do that a few times to get used to it one 2 ready go down down up up down up down down up up down up middle finger on off on off awesome and then you would just apply that exact same thing to your a chord so now let's go ahead and put our a chord on and again what I want you to do is for the first two down strums we're going to have our a chord just as is with all three fingers down down down but then for the rest of this I want you to lift off your ring finger and then play the rest of the pattern up up down up all right so let's try a again again we've got down down lift up up down down up up down up down down up down up ring finger on off on off down down up up down up down down up down up awesome so once you get the Rhythm down all you have to do now is go back and forth between your D and your a chord so let's go ahead and try that without stopping 1 2 3 4 down down up up down up twice switch to a lift down down up up down up back to D twice a twice you got it blue strawberry ice cream SPO for two and trading jackets awesome so again this strumming pattern can be applied for the entire song and I do think that that's a really fun way to play it and has a lot of similarities to the original song however I did come up with a picking pattern that I think sounds really beautiful with this song as well so I wanted to share that with you guys so let's go ahead and jump into how I would do the picking the chorus and the verse so when you going to tell all right guys so I've zoomed in so we can take a closer look at this picking pattern and again if you've never seen any of my other tutorials I do want to just point out that I actually like to number my strings and so you can see here low E is number six and it goes 54 3 2 1 all the way to the high E string which is number one so whenever I'm doing picking pattern tutorials I do like to refer to the strings as numbers so just to let you know that's what I'll be doing in this one as well um but this picking pattern it sounds really beautiful but it's actually not that hard to play so what I want you to do I'm going to kind of break this down a little differently than I normally do um we're going to put our D chord on since that's the first chord in the song and what I want you to do to start out is I want you to take your middle finger and your pointer finger put them on the second and third strings G and your B string so first finger or pointer finger on G middle finger on B 3 and two okay and what I want you to do is just go back and forth we're going to go middle pointer middle pointer all right so back and forth that's kind of the basis of this entire picking pattern so after you can do that back and forth 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 now the next step would be to take your ring finger and put that on the top E string okay your first string and now what I want you to do is every time you play your middle finger in in that back and forth pattern every other time I want you to also P play your ring finger okay so you're also going to play your top e so you're going to go back and forth like this now 1 and 2 3 1 and 2 3 so it's going to go 1 2 3 4 so see how I'm only adding that top E string every other time that it's played so 2 1 3 2 3 2 1 3 2 3 all right nice and then the last step in this picking pattern is now you want to add your thumb to the base notes so now go ahead and put your thumb on that fourth D string and you're going to play this fourth D string every time you play your high E string okay so now we've got our fingers like this we've got thumb on our fourth middle finger on our second and ring on our first and you're going to pick them all the same time then you still want to do that back and forth but again we're going to alternate so it's going to go do you see how we're doing all of the fingers every other time so we've got 4 2 1 3 2 3 4 2 1 3 2 3 nice so once you do that the last step you want to do is now we want to do that same thing that we were doing with our stringing pattern where on our D chord on our left hand we're going to lift our middle finger okay but the picking pattern on your right hand is still going to be exactly the same so now we've got with our decord on so see now we're alternating again with our um second finger on on the D chord and then off and then off back on off all right nice and so the beautiful thing about this picking pattern is that when we move to our a chord your right hand is going to be basically the same the only thing you want to do now is move your thumb up one more string to our fifth a string okay but the actual pattern is still going to be the same so now we've got 5 2 1 3 2 3 awesome and then again just like with our D chord the very last step now is on your left hand you want to mimic what we were doing with our strumming and we're just going to lift off our ring finger okay so the picking is still the same on our right hand you're going to go then we want to lift our ring finger then put it back on then lift it off all right so again we're just alternating back and forth between having that finger on and off so our a chord is so it is a lot to remember but go ahead and just make sure that you pause the video and practice at your own Tempo until you can speed it up but the good thing about this pattern too is that I think it sounds really beautiful it kind of like is sentimental like the song and you can use it to play through the entire song start to finish so let me just go ahead and show you a little bit of how that sounds switch to a back to D cor right to malib strawber ice cream one spoon for two and trading jacket laughing about how small it looks on you nice and again like I said you can use that for the entire song I think it sounds really great um or you can do a combination of picking and strumming which is actually what I like to do in my cover here at the end so let's go ahead and put everything together so we can play through the whole song you get deja vu strawberry ice cream in Malibu don't act like we didn't do that too your trading jackets like we used to do all right guys so now that you know those cords and the strumming and the picking pattern to play through this song it's your turn to have some fun so make sure to join me right here for my FasTrack You Know cover portion of this tutorial where we'll play through the whole song together or if you find yourself needing a little bit more help I also have some guitar guides right here as well as a customizable interactive backing track where you can slow things down and isolate different guitar parts and things like that so make sure to check that out on my patreon page as well if you need a little extra help but either of these things really fun we'll play through the song together it'll be a jam so go ahead and join me in one of these