Fix You by Coldplay Tutorial/Lesson
Fix You
C, Em, Am, G, F, F/C, Gsus4
Download Printable Guitar Guide
Unlock with Patreon
Watch play along cover
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 my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play Fix You by Coldplay on the guitar 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 alright guys so I'm going to show you seven chord shapes to play through this song today but two of them are going to be kind of optional so let me explain that in a second um first of all let's start with our C major chord which looks like this and sounds like this oh 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 in my free beginner course right here on YouTube so make sure to check that out the next chord shape is our E minor a minor we also have our G chord and then here is our F chord now I know bar chords can be difficult for some people so you can actually Swap this out for an F over c chord foreign or if you know how to play both I actually like to use both throughout my cover or also if you would rather not play the F over C you can swap that out for your bardiff and then the last chord here is our G suspended IV chord and again this is another one of those optional cords if you don't like you know the way that this feels on your hand then you can always just swap that out for a regular G chord and again vice versa if you don't like the regular G you can swap it out for G sus4 throughout the song both of those optional chords F over C and G suspended four I like to use in my cover and it kind of just gives it a little bit more of a different sound but again it's totally up to you which chord shapes you would like to use throughout your cover so go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to memorize these different chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them it will make learning the rest of the song so much easier and if transitioning between chords fast enough is something that you're currently struggling with I would suggest checking out my practice with me Series right here on YouTube where we practice the skill and build it together in real time but with that being said let's go ahead and talk about the strumming all right so I always suggest if you are new to guitar or someone who struggles with playing guitar and singing at the same time I would recommend starting out with a practice pattern which is just a single down strum and you're going to play that for every time you see a chord change as you sing to the song it's really going to help you get used to where those chord changes occur while you're singing so a quick example of what that would look like with verse 1 would look like this when you try your best but you don't succeed when you get what you want but not what you need all right so basically you would do that for the entire song and just make a mental note of wherever those chords are going to be happening what word you're singing things like that and this is actually something you practice right now if you visit my patreon page I do have this whole guide available to download and print out which can help you speed up this whole process but with that being said let's go ahead and talk about the full strumming pattern alright guys so we're going to stick with a fairly simple strumming pattern today as you can see it's just down down down up so let's go ahead and zoom in and talk a little bit about this Rhythm alright guys so we're sticking with a fairly simple eighth note strumming pattern today so we're going to count that like this we have one two three four one two three four and one two three four and down down down down up all right and basically you just want to play this pattern one time through per chord in the intro the verses as well as that kind of long instrumental break towards the end and then in the choruses and the bridge and the outro of the song you would actually repeat this pattern two times per chord so it'll make a lot more sense when we go through this song so let's go ahead and pull up verse one each of these chords is going to get one strumming pattern so we have C down down E minor down down one time for core can be applied for all the verses all right and like I said that'll apply for all of the verses in the song now like I said sometimes you'll have to repeat this pattern two times for certain parts of the song so for example the chorus so if we bring that up basically each of these chords you're going to do the exact same pattern but you're going to do it twice per chord so starting with our F we have down down up twice to your G down down down up twice all right right now sometimes I will try on that last G I just do a single down strum try to fix you and then you go back into one time records all right all right just like we practiced earlier so basically this strumming pattern you can actually apply for the entire song and it sounds really great the song is pretty slow and kind of mellow so you don't really need to go super fancy with the strumming and I think this is a really easy one to just kind of like count in your head as you're playing through it however there is something that I think sounds really pretty with this song which is more of a picking pattern or a tab so I wanted to go ahead and show you guys my suggestion on how to play that and really quick guys before we jump into the picking I wanted to take a second to kind of sponsor myself in this video so if you are enjoying this and finding it helpful please make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well subscribe to my channel because it really does help and if you are anyone who's struggling with anything that we've taught so far chord shaves transitioning Rhythm things like that you can always check out my patreon page where I offer exclusive perks to all of my patrons including printable guides customizable backing tracks polls where you can vote on what songs you want to see on my channel and even video troubleshooting where you can send me a video with any questions that you have or your struggle with and I will send you my video response back these are just some of the perks that I offer over on my patreon page so if you would like to get your hands on some of these exclusive perks while simultaneously supporting this channel I will make sure to link all of that in the description box down below alright guys so I have a fairly straightforward picking pattern that I want to show you for this song but first of all if you don't know how to read the tab that you're seeing at the top of the screen make sure to check out my video right here about how to read guitar tabs I did a fun little kind of interactive video that gives you the basics for there but then once you have that down we can come back and look at this tab so basically what you want to do is for each chord we're just going to pick certain strings so starting with our c chord on our left hand all I want you to do is take your thumb and put that on the lowest bass string which is your a string then you're going to take your pointer and your middle finger and put those on the G and the B strings okay and those are always going to stay here so for our c chord we have thumb pointer middle pointer a string g string B string g string all right three zero one zero super simple right and you can actually apply this for the other chords in the verses so for E minor you can put your E minor chord shape down although you don't have to because we're just going to be picking open strings so for this you're going to move your thumb from the a string to the low E string but otherwise it's the same so we have thumb pointer middle pointer then our next chord shape is our a minor on our left hand same thing except your thumb is going to be moving from the low E back to that a string so we have open two one two and then the last chord here is our G chord so again just your G chord shape on your left hand move your thumb back down to that low E string e g b g and those are the only four chords you need to know to play through the verses so if you string them together it sounds like this we have C E minor a minor G all right and then if you go a little bit faster then you can hear what it sounds like with the verses foreign so you can see how the picking or tab has a little bit of more of a softer kind of quality to it I think that sounds really good with the verses so that's where I like to apply it now really quick I wanted to show you also a picking you could do for the F chord and the G chord because you can also use picking for the courses so on our F chord now I do recommend using The Bard F if you want to do this picking because it'll sound a lot more like the song so basically you want to have your F chord shape down on your left hand and what we're going to do is pick with our thumb the low E string then remember these two fingers are still on your G and your B strings but this time we're going to also add our ring finger on our right hand to the high E string okay so then what you want to do is go thumb pointer middle pointer ring pointer then here on the Open high E string you just want to kind of lift your bar right there so that you can kind of let go of the um the high E string so you're basically picking it open so earlier it was first fret now it's open and then I like to use this last little beat here as a time to transition to my G chord so as all my fingers are off the strings I'll go back and do the G string all right so for our F chord it sounds like this okay so you can see on those last two opens that's when I'm transitioning chords okay so then we go into our G chord again you're just holding a G chord on your left hand but the picking is going to be basically the same we have our low e g b g High e g b g all right so with our fingers thumb pointer middle pointer ring pointer middle pointer a little bit easier than the F chord there okay so if you do those back to back you can do that with the chorus G back to f g ilded and I will try again on that G I like to end it halfway to fix you then you go back to that first picking pattern all right and basically that is the tab that I kind of think sounds really pretty with this song I like to use it mostly in the intro and verse one and the chord first chorus and then once we get into verse two I kind of switch into strumming for the rest of the song except for the outro but that's just my preference so go ahead and pause this video and you know look at this tab as long as you need to to kind of really get it under your belt and then you can figure out where you like to apply it in this song and what you think sounds best of course this whole thing is optional you could totally just strum the whole song as well so once you have that down we can come back and put everything we've learned together to play through the song two ready go when you try your best but you don't succeed when you get what you want but not what you need when you feel Want to Have Fun jamming out 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 guitar tutorials I'll make sure to leave a link in the description box down below if you liked learning this song with me then you should definitely check out this video not only does it have a super similar Vibe but it's just as easy and fun to play so I'll see you over there bye