Every Breath You Take by The Police Tutorial/Lesson
Every Breath You Take
G, Em, C, D, Csus2/A#, A7, Cm7, F
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Video transcript
hey everyone it's ellen here and today i'm going to be showing you guys how to play every breath you take by the police on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something that you'd like to learn but before we jump into the tutorial i wanted to take a second to thank today's sponsor burroughs guitars if you're looking for a quality beginner guitar that is both durable and beautiful while still having an affordable price tag consider a burroughs designed in and named after the five boroughs of new york city these are the perfect starter guitar for anyone excited to begin their music journey not only are they super easy and fun to play but these guitars are the best you'll find at this inexpensive price point with six different models and several finishes to choose from you'll be sure to find the one that fits your personality and musical tastes perfectly best of all all burrows guitars ship directly and exclusively from adorama a trusted site for all your creative needs so if playing guitar is something you or a loved one have been considering check out the links in the description box and get started today so i'm going to classify this song as more of an intermediate level for a few reasons but first of all let's go ahead and talk about our guitar you will need it to be in standard tuning and go ahead and put your capo on the first fret if you want to play in the original key today i have eight different chord shapes to show you and two of them are bar chords which is one of the reasons i feel like this is a little bit more advanced and on top of that i have two strumming patterns to show you that you can kind of figure out which one you want to do as well as one picking pattern that sounds a lot more like the original song so that's the other reason i think it's a little bit more advanced as well but overall i don't think it's too bad so let's go ahead and jump into the tutorial and we'll start with the chords alright guys so like i said we have eight different chord shapes to play through this song today and we're going to 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 i do cover how to do that in my beginner series so i will link that video right here for those of you who need it but next we have our e minor chord then we have a c next is d after that we have our c suspended two over a sharp chord which i know sounds like a mouthful but it's not that hard to play that is our a7 chord and now we're gonna get into our bar chords the first one is our c minor seven and then the last chord you need to know is our f chord and those are the eight shapes you need to know for the song so as i always say if any of these chord shapes are new to you or you're not used to transitioning to and from them go ahead and pause the video and just take a few moments to do that it'll really help you get the rest of the song a lot faster but once you've done that we can go ahead and talk a little bit more about the strumming all right so i'm going to start you guys off with a practice pattern like i always do which is just one single down strum on the beat for every chord change this is the best for people who are maybe not familiar with the song or have trouble singing and playing at the same time you always want to start here just to kind of get your bearings so i'm going to go ahead and put the first verse here on screen and all you want to do is a single down strum for every single time you see a chord change and kind of sing through the song just to make sure you know where those chord transitions are going to be so here's an example every breath you take every move you make every bond you break every step you take i'll be watching you all right so basically you would want to do this exact same process for the entire song and just really get your feet wet with like where those transitions are going to come up and stuff like that and then once you've done that we'll go ahead and jump into our actual strumming patterns so for strumming for this song i came up with two different beginner-friendly patterns and it's kind of a choose-your-own-adventure situation where you can figure out which one you like you know better so i'm going to go ahead and just start us out with this one which is down down up up down up and it's going to sound a little something like this so basically you're gonna take this pattern and either play it one time or repeat it twice for every song and you can actually use it for the entire song and it sounds pretty good so let's go ahead and just get used to the rhythm let's put our g chords on our left hand i'm gonna go through this pattern a few times and i want you to jump in whenever you feel comfortable with it okay one two ready go down down up up down up down down up go ahead and jump in we're just getting used to this rhythm down down up up down up down down up up down up nice all right so hopefully you have that rhythm kind of internalized if not just go ahead and rewind and do it again and again until you kind of get the feeling of it more but once you have that rhythm down all you want to do now is add in those chord transitions and like i said sometimes you're going to repeat this pattern twice for a chord and other times you're just going to do it once so as an example with our first verse we have our g chord is going to be twice down down up up down up again e minor's twice down down up up down up again then here on c and d you're only going to do it once c down up up down up d down up up down up and then e minor will be repeated down down up up down up every breath you take every move you make every bond you break every step you take i'll be watching you all right awesome and then as i said this strumming pattern can be applied for the entire song so let's go ahead and pull up the chorus just so you can get an idea of what that sounds like so here we're going from c once down up up down up to c suspended two over a sharp down down up up down up and then the rest of these chords are just going to get twice g down up up down up again a7 twice d twice oh can't you see you belong to how my me heart aches with every step you take so if you're gelling with this strumming pattern and you're playing it nicely and you like the way it sounds you could definitely apply it for the entire song but i did come up with another strumming pattern that's just as equally beginner friendly that also sounds good with this song so let's go ahead and talk a little bit about strumming pattern two alright so for our second strumming pattern as you can see it's just eight down strums and it's gonna sound a little something like this and like strumming pattern one you can apply this pattern for the entire song and it sounds pretty good one thing to mention is i am going to underline a few of these arrows and basically all that means is you want to accent those beats so you're just going to strum with a little extra force and it's really going to help the rhythm of this song so again let's go ahead and put our g chord on to try this out you're gonna play just eight down strums one two three four five six seven eight but again when you accent the underlined ones it's gonna sound more like this one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight all right so again i'm gonna play through this for a few measures and i want you to just jump in whenever you feel comfortable one two ready go one two three awesome now as you might have noticed i'm not using a pick in this tutorial just because i like to play through this song a little bit more with like the picking like finger style version but if you are going to do this kind of 8 down strum pattern i would recommend to use a pick because it'll give it a little bit more of that attack and you'll just hear those accents a little bit better but anyways let's go ahead and put this into the cord so i'm going to pull up first one again and like i said it's going to be the same as stripping pattern one so all of the cords we repeat twice are the same no matter which strumming pattern you're doing so for the verses you would go g again e minor twice c is just once d is just once e minor every breath you day i'll be watching you and again same exact pattern can be used for the chorus so let's bring that up we have c once c suspended over a sharp once g twice a seven repeated to d twice oh can't you see you belong to me with every step you take so with these strumming patterns just remember that this is just my suggestion these are two beginner-friendly patterns that sound really good with this song if you want to you could even like change back and forth between them or as i always say feel free to experiment on your own and see what strumming patterns you come up with i think those are always the best ones to go with if you plan on doing a cover and singing at the same time because that's just what's most natural for you but like i said earlier what i like to do when i play through this song is actually use more of a finger style finger picking pattern so um let's go ahead and zoom in and i can show you how you can do that alright guys so i've zoomed in a little bit so we can take a closer look at this picking pattern but before we begin i do just want to say that i usually number my strings so the low e string is six and it goes five four three two one all the way to the high e string it just makes more sense in my head to number them so hopefully it does in yours as well but for the rest of this picking portion i will be referring to these strings as their number so with that being said let's go ahead and jump right in the first thing i want to show you on your left hand is when you're playing this g chord to make it sound a little bit more accurate to the actual song what you want to do is just remove your ring finger from your g chord and then move your pointer finger down two strings okay that's what the new kind of chord should sound like and g is the only chord that we're going to be changing uh the left hand position for i just think it sounds so much better like this so if you have your g chord like this on my left hand from there we can actually talk about the right hand picking pattern so um with all of these chords because we have so many different ones i do just want to kind of go over some ground rules if you put your pointer and middle and ring finger on your d g and b strings so on four three and two these three fingers will never move from these three strings in this picking pattern for the most part so just get used to having those three fingers assigned to these three strings okay the thumb is going to move a little bit depending on what chord you're playing so we want our thumb to cover the bass note in each chord so in our g that is our sixth low e string but in c for example that's our fifth a string so your thumb is going to move you know according to whatever chord you're playing but the other three are always going to be kind of basically anchored here so with our new g chord shape down all you want to do is go from thumb pointer middle pointer ring pointer middle pointer all right i know that seems like a lot of information but i promise if you can get this g chord down the rest of the chords follow the very similar pattern but you go six four three four two four three four or with your fingers that would be thumb pointer middle pointer ring pointer middle pointer all right and that's how you play this g anytime you come across it in this song this is how you would pick it all right so go ahead and pause the video and just make sure that you can kind of get the coordination you need to get that fingering down because like i said the rest of these chords are going to follow suit so with our e minor chord it's actually going to be played exactly the same way so we're going to go 6 4 3 4 2 4 three four thumb pointer middle pointer ring pointer middle pointer all right next chord is our c chord for here you're going to move your thumb from the sixth low e string to the fifth a string but the other three fingers are still going to stay on the same strings and you're going to play them in the same order so for c we have 5 4 3 four two four three four okay again that's all right since we're already on the c chord let's go ahead and do our c suspended two over a sharp chord because that's actually going to be played the same way as well so we have five four three four two four three four again that's and then along with our c chords we also have our a7 and that's gonna be played the exact same way as well we have five four three four two four three four one more time all right then we're getting into our bar chords our c minor seven is going to be played just like our c and our c suspended ii chord you're just gonna go five four three four two four three four all right again then we have our other bar chord which is our f for here you want to move your thumb back down to the low e string okay so this one's going to go 6 four three four two four three four all right and those bar chords are going to come in handy for the bridge now you might have noticed the one chord that i did leave out was our d chord that's because it's the only chord that we're going to pick a little bit differently so if you put your d chord on your left hand basically where our fingers are now we're going to shift them all down one string so now your ring finger is going to be on high e your middle finger is going to be on the b string and your pointer finger is going to be on the g string okay and your thumb is going to cover the bass note which in our d chord is our fourth d string so for the d chord only your thumb is going to be on four your pointer is on three your middle is on two and your ring fingers on the high e one all right but the actual pattern doesn't change much so here we're gonna go four three two three one three two three all right nice so i'm going to go ahead and leave all of these cords here on screen so go ahead and pause and practice if you need to and then once you kind of have it more under your belt we can put some of it together to see how it goes into the song so once you feel more comfortable with your right hand and picking the right strings and things like that you just want to practice with the metronome to get this a little bit faster so we want to be going around this tempo one and two and three and four and right so again pause and make sure that you can get all of your chords up to that speed and then once you do we can put together some of how it would sound in the song so for example if we put up our verse 1 you're going to follow the same pattern we did with our strumming so for example g and e minor we're going to repeat twice again e minor twice and again just like with strumming c and d are only going to be played once see remember to shift your fingers for d shift them back for e minor twice every breath you take every move you make every bond you break every step you take i'll be watching you all right nice and again the same thing can be applied to the chorus so on the chorus just like with strumming your c is going to be once c suspended is going to be once g is going to be twice a seven is twice d is twice as well oh can't you see you belong to me awesome so again just some words of encouragement this picking pattern does seem pretty difficult but once you get the actual pattern down all of the other cords kind of follow the same pattern so it's really not as hard as it might look um so go ahead and pause and practice and make sure that you can get that picking pattern down and then when you get back we can put together everything we learned to play through the whole song one two ready go every breath you take every move you make every bond you break every step you take i'll be watching want to have fun jamming along 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 i card right up here all right guys but that does it for my tutorial today i really hope that it helped you if it did 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 huge thank you goes out to burroughs guitars for sponsoring this video as well as 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 and of course i want to thank all my patrons on patreon for supporting my channel and making videos just like this one possible 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 a few times a year so make sure to check it out but i think that ends this tutorial 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 bye you