Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen Tutorial/Lesson
Hallelujah
C, G, Am, F, E7
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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 Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen on the guitar so stay tuned to this is something that you'd like to learn and really quick before we jump into the tutorial I wanted to take a second to thank today's sponsor and new music I will actually be featuring their next G smart guitar in this tutorial today so if you would like to check it out for yourself I will make sure to leave a link in the description box down below as well as in this icard right up here alright guys so I'm going to go ahead and label this a beginner slash intermediate song but I will be showing you kind of a way you can make it a little bit more simplified as well as more of an official sounding version but before we talk about any of that let's go ahead and 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 on top of that I only have five chords to show you to play with the whole song however one of them is a bar chord which is f but I will also be showing you a non-barred version to play that F chord and then I wanted to take you through one strumming pattern that you can use for the whole song or one picking pattern that you can use for the whole song with all that being said let's go ahead and jump into the tutorial and we'll start with the chords alright guys so I've zoomed in a little bit to take a closer look at these chords we're going to start with our C which looks like this and sounds like this and if you don't know how to read these chord charts that you're seeing on screen I actually do cover how to do that in my beginner series episode three so I will link that right here for those of you who need it the next chord is our G chord have our a minor and we have our E7 and the last chord is our bar chord which is our F chord but as promised if bar chord shapes are hard for you you can actually replace this with an F over C foreign and those are all the chords you need to know to play this song now as they always say before you go any further make sure to pause the video and just take a few minutes to practice memorizing those chord shapes as well as transitioning back and forth between them it will make learning the rest of the song just that much easier but once you've done that we can go ahead and jump into the strumming pattern that I'd like to show you for this song alright and as always before we jump into the full strumming pattern I wanted to start you guys off with a practice pattern which is just a simple down strum on every chord change and this is really great for people who are beginners at guitar or people who struggle with singing and playing their guitar at the same time this is basically what you want to do is just take that single down strum for every chord change that you see while you're singing through it and just take a mental note of which word you're singing whenever those chords are changing and that'll help you when we kind of increase the difficulty of the strumming so let me go ahead and pull up a little bit of the song here and then we can kind of go through this together so as you can see here we're starting with our c chord and basically all you want to do is practice singing through it and do a single down strum for every time you see one of those chord changes and then let's go ahead and go into the pre-chorus as well because it's a little different there all right I wanted to go over that really quick because you'll see there's a little star by the F and the G chord and that's because those are going to transition a little bit faster than the rest of the chords so right now when we're doing the single down strum it doesn't make that much of a difference but it will when we get into the full strumming and the picking so just kind of take a mental note of how those two chords are going to move a little bit faster but basically what you want to do is go through the entire song with the single down strum sing through the whole thing and just make sure you know where those chords are transitioning or what where you're singing whenever they are and there's actually something you can do right now I do have this entire guide available on my patreon page and you can print it out and kind of sing through it and just get used to the song before we move into the full strumming pattern so make sure to check that out if you would like to but with that said let's go ahead and move on to the full strumming pattern that I would recommend for this song Alright guys so the strumming I would recommend for this song as you can see is just down down up down up and it's going to sound like this foreign move forward with practicing this strumming pattern it's important that you understand the time signature that we're in so this song is going to be in six eight time which feels very much like when you're counting you would count to six so it's like one two three four five six one two three four five six think of like a waltz or kind of thing like that so that's important with the counting because when we count it it's going to be one and two and one and a two and uh and so with this strumming pattern you're basically just leaving out the and after the one so it's gonna go one a two and a one a two and a down up down up down down up down up okay so if you can kind of internalize that Rhythm it'll make this whole thing a lot easier but let's go ahead and put our c chord on since that's the first chord in the song and just play through this Rhythm for a few measures until you get it so we have one two three four five six one two three ready go down up down up down down up down up awesome so once you kind of get that waltzy kind of feeling in your bones all you have to do now is put the chord transitions in there so what we're going to do is play this full strumming pattern one time through for each chord so you can see here we're going from C to a minor so you're gonna do the full strumming pattern on each of those chords on C we have down down up down up then you go to a minor down down up down up you do that again C down up down up a minor down up then that last line there we have F down down up down up G down down up down up just knee down down up down up to G down down up down up all right so every single chord in there gets the full strumming pattern if you put in the singing it'll sound like this right now let's go ahead and talk about the next part of this song as I said earlier that f and g has a little star by it because it is going to feel like it's moving a little faster because the transitions are a little faster so basically what you want to do between that f and g chord is we're going to take the strumming pattern and split it in half so for the F chord you're going to do the first two down strums down and then you're gonna finish out the pattern with your G chord up down up all right so it's the same exact strumming pattern that we're playing we're just splitting it up between two chords so we have down down up down up all right f g so that's the only part of this song where this strumming pattern is going to be you know feel a little bit different the rest of the chords in this whole song are always going to get a full pattern all right so for the pre-chorus we have C full h there then we have F down down G up down up then a minor against this little pattern F gets the full pattern g e seven a minor goes like this before all right and there on the end of the pre-chorus on the word hallelujah you're going to do that a minor for one full pattern and then I like to just come back in with one more down strum before we go into the chorus now the chorus is a little bit different as well because now we're going to repeat this strumming pattern twice for each of the chords in the chorus so an F we have one two a minor twice f and then here at the end we go from C to G and each of those are going to just get ones so c g me again G again all right so the chorus sounds like this and great and the best thing about this song is that it is really repetitive so we've gone through every little part of the song the verses the precourses and the chorus and again you're going to use this strumming pattern it's going to be exactly the same for the rest of the song So if this is where you're comfortable with with rhythm and your guitar skills it totally sounds really pretty if you do the strumming pattern for your cover however the more official kind of sounding way to play this song would be with a finger picking pattern and I did come up with a really simple one for you guys so let's go ahead and zoom in so I can show you how to do it all right guys so before we begin breaking down this finger picking pattern I did just want to explain to you that I like to number my guitar strings so the low E here is six and it goes five four three two one all the way to the high E string which is one in my head it just makes more sense to number these strings so hopefully it does for you as well but for the rest of this picking portion I will be referring to my guitar strings as numbers so with that being said let's go ahead and talk about our right picking hand what I want you to do is take your pointer middle and ring finger and they are going to live here on the bottom three guitar strings okay so your pointers on G your middle fingers on B and your ring fingers on that high E string throughout this entire thing these three fingers will not leave these strings the only one that is going to move around is your thumb okay and the thumb is going to cover whichever no is the bass note in whatever chord you're playing so for example if we start with our c chord which is the first chord in the song your lowest string that you play is that fifth a string okay so your thumb is going to stay here on the fifth string and then remember these three fingers live on the bottom three and the pattern goes like this you're gonna go five three two one and then you're gonna go back up the guitar two three all right and that's the whole pattern so C is five three two one two three for the Rhythm it's gonna be just like our strumming pattern you want that waltzy kind of feel still so it's gonna go five three two one two three five three two one two three one and a two and a one and a two and uh all right so that rhythm is going to be the same for all of these other chords as well so let's go ahead and move on to our a minor chord now your thumb is going to stay on this fifth string because that's the lowest string in this chord and the exact same pattern is going to be applied so we have five three two one two three all right again a minor is five three two one two three let's go ahead and Skip and talk about our G chord now now these three fingers will still be on the bottom three strings but your thumb is going to move to this low E string or number six because that's the lowest string we play when we play G all right but the rest of the pattern is the same so it's going to look like this six three two one two three all right E7 same thing you're going to keep your thumb on the sixth string so it goes six three two one two three and now let's go ahead and talk about that F chord if you're playing the barred version of f you're nothing's going to change with the pattern it's still going to be six three two one two three however at the beginning I did give you that alternate F over c chord and if that's what you're opting to play you will have to move the fingers on your right hand for this okay so if you're picking this song and you're playing that F over c chord your thumb is going to be on the fifth a string pointer on the fourth D middle on the third G and then ring finger on the second B so basically removing all three of these fingers up one string okay and then once your fingers are in this position that F over c chord is going to be played five four three two three four a and that's how you would play the F over c chord if that's what you're replacing however if you can handle the bar version of F that is what I would recommend playing because it sounds better so remember Bard f is six three two one two three all right so now we can actually go ahead and play through most of this song because that is the pattern you would use through most of the song so let's go ahead and bring up the lyrics again now the way you play through this with picking is just like how we played through it with the strumming so for the verses each of these chords that you see on screen is just going to get one full picking pattern so C gets five three two one two three a minor gets five three two one two three back to C back to a minor then we have f g c back to G all right now I heard there was a secret chord that David played in it please music so you can kind of see how that picking pattern that we practice is coming into play now now let's go ahead and talk a little bit more about the pre-chorus because again this is going to be a little bit different just like it was with strumming so we're starting with our c chord you're going to give this a full picking pattern five three two one two three then here remember these f and g chords are starred because they're going to move a little bit faster so what you want to do for these next two chords is just play the beginning half of the picking pattern so for your F chord you're going to go six three two and then stop okay it's just six three two that's the whole pattern then you would move to your G chord same thing six three two so we're not doing the entire pattern just the first three notes so f g all right and again this is the only place in the song that is going to be a little bit different so the pre-chorus would be like this C f g a minor f g e seven a minor and then again here on the a minor I like to do the full picking pattern and then just end on the fifth string and kind of let it ring out all right so the whole pre-chorus would sound like this goes like this before right great and then the only other part of the song we have to go through is the chorus so again just like with strumming for the chorus you are going to repeat this picking pattern two times for the F and a minor chords and then for the C and G chords you're just going to do it once so we're gonna go f twice to a minor twice back to F twice then we go C once G ones C ones back to G ones so the full course is like this all right and that is how you can apply this picking pattern through the entire song if you can handle it or you find this easier I would recommend playing through this song with the picking just because it sounds a lot more like the original but with all of that being said let's go ahead and put everything together so we can play through the song foreign playing through 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 I think that ends my video for today 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 guitar tutorials another thank you goes out to Enya music for sponsoring today's video as well as a special shout out to my top patrons over on my patreon page I will make sure to have all of their names listed on screen right now and of course thank you to all of my patrons on patreon for supporting my channel and making videos just like it's 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 of 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 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 bye foreign