Hey Soul Sister by Train Tutorial/Lesson
Hey Soul Sister
C, G, Am, F, F(alt)
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Video transcript
Hey everyone, my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play Hazel Sister by [music] Train on the guitar. So stay tuned if this is something that you'd like to learn. And before we jump into it today, I wanted to give a huge thank you and shout out to all of my patrons over on my Patreon page for voting for this song as this month's patron picks. If you want a little bit of voting power in the tutorials that you see here on my channel, make sure to check out my Patreon page, which will be linked down below. All right, guys. So, let's go ahead and jump into the overview of how to play this song. This is going to be pretty beginner friendly. Um, you want to make sure your guitar is in standard tuning with your cable on the fourth fret. [music] That's going to put you in the original key as the original song. And it's also going to allow us to play the easiest chord shapes possible. With your cable on the fourth fret, you're going to need to know four chord shapes. And all of them are open chords except for one, which is our F chord, which is a bar chord. But because I want to keep this beginner friendly, I will be showing you an alternate fingering for F chord where you don't have to bar any chord. So, it can be very beginner friendly in that aspect. Um, and on top of that, I wanted to show you three different strumming patterns that you can use to play through this song. So, let's go ahead and jump into it. And we'll start with the chords. [music] All right, guys. So, I've zoomed in a little bit so we can take a closer look at these chords. [music] Like I said, there are four shapes that you're going to have to know to play through the whole song. And the first one we're going to start with is our C, which looks like this. And sounds like this. After that we have our G shape which looks like this and sounds like this. [music] Next is our A minor which looks like this and sounds like this. And then our last shape is going to be our bar chord, which is our F chord, which looks like this. And sounds like this. [music] But of course, as promised, if you're a beginner and bar chord shapes are hard for you, there is an alternate way you can play this F, which is going to look like this. And sound like this. So, if you want to, you can go through this whole tutorial and replace your F bar chord shape with this F alternate shape. Uh, but with that being said, those are the chords you need to know to play this song. All right, guys. [music] So, make sure to pause the video and take a few moments to memorize those chord shapes as well as transition back and forth between them. This song does move pretty quickly, so you want to make sure that those transitions are down [music] pack. If that's something you need help with, I do have a video right here that talks more about how to practice transitions and practice tips and things like that. And if you're struggling with bar chords, I did want to quickly plug my Murio guitar, which you can get on Amazon. These guitars are specifically designed to make bar chord shapes easier by having a lower action and things like that. So, if you're interested, I will put my affiliate link in the description box below. But once you're comfortable with those chord shapes and those transitions, we can move on to the strumming patterns that I would suggest using for this song. Hey, mystery on the radio. Stereo the [singing] way over. Hey, sister. [singing] All right, guys. If you're familiar with any of my other tutorials, I always start people out with a practice pattern, which is just one downstrum on the beat for every chord change. This is a great place to start if you are a beginner and have trouble with singing and playing at the same time or if you're someone who struggles with rhythm or you're just someone who's not super familiar with the song. So, what you want to do is just go through the whole song and do one simple downstrum on every time you see a chord change. So, let's go ahead and take the first verse as an example. So, you're just going to start on your C chord and strum down once. Then you go to G. [music] Then we have a minor and then our F chord. All right. [music] And basically just do that for the whole song. Practice singing along with your one downstrum pattern just to make sure that you're really aware of where all of those transitions are going to take place. So if we took the first verse as an example with our lyrics, it would look something like this. Your lipstick [singing] stains [music] on the front lo of my left side brain. All right. So, just make yourself really familiar with the song. But once you get that, we can move on to strumming pattern one. All right, guys. So, our very first strumming pattern is the one that I would say is used probably for 90% of the song, which as you can see is down, down, up, down, up. And it's going to sound a little something like this. All right, guys. And we are going to take this pattern and we're going to repeat this either once or twice for every chord. And like I said earlier, it's going to be the main strumming pattern that we're going to use for most of the song. So, let's go ahead and just practice the motion. We'll put our C chord down since that's the first chord in this song. And we're just going to go down, down, up, down, up. And that's the whole pattern. All right, guys. So, go ahead and pause the video and practice that motion a few times if you need to. Otherwise, the next step would be to make sure you can play it a little bit faster and in rhythm. So, I'm gonna go ahead and count us off, and I want you to jump in whenever you feel comfortable. Let's keep our C chords down for this. 1 2 1 2 Ready, go. Down, [singing] up, down, down, down, up, down, up, down, [music and singing] down, up, down, down, up, down, up. down, down, up, down, down, down, up, [music] Awesome. So, I know that might have felt a little bit fast. So, if you're struggling to keep up, make sure to rewind and try that over and over again until you can get it at tempo. But once you get it at tempo and in the right rhythm, the next step is to add in those chord transitions. So, let me go ahead and put those up on screen. As you can see, we're going to go from C to G to A minor to F. And I want you to play each of these chords or I want you to play this pattern twice for each of these chords. So, I'm going to count us off again and let's go ahead and play through the intro part of the song. 1 2 Ready, go. C, down, down, [singing and music] up, down, G, down, up, down, up. A minor F. Remember, each of these hits [music] twice. G twice. A minor. Down. Down. Up. Down. F. You got it. Hey. [singing] All right, guys. So, like I said earlier, once you can get that strumming down at tempo, that's basically like 90% of the song of how we're going to be using this strumming pattern. I did just want to add in something that's completely optional. Really quick, though, um if you wanted to, I would suggest using a palm mute with this pattern whenever you're playing through the verses and then letting it ring whenever you do the choruses. So, when I say palm mute, all I mean is we're going to kind of dampen the sound that the strings make by taking the side of our pick hand and just gently laying it right here on your strings between the sound hole and the bridge. The closer you get to the bridge, the more it'll ring. So, basically, instead of letting it ring out, we're just going to kind of anchor our side of our hand here. And you can hear it's kind of a little more dampened. So now when you do that rhythm, totally optional, but if you like palm muting and that's something you want to practice, then I would suggest putting that in your cover for the verses. Um, but with that being said, let's go ahead and move on to strumming pattern two. All right, guys. So strumming pattern two is down, down, up, down, down, up. And it's going to sound a little something like this. So, this pattern is not going to be used nearly as much as strumming pattern one. Um, but I did want to include it in this tutorial because it's important to do this whenever you are coming across those chord transitions that are moving a little bit faster than the others. So, um, let's just go ahead and explain the pattern first. We have down, down, up, And I'm going to put a little vertical line in the middle here. And that's going to represent where we're changing chords. So you can see in this same measure, we're going to go from one chord on the left side to another chord on the right side. A really good example of where you'll see this in this song, I think almost exclusively, is in the chorus. At the end of the chorus, he goes, "Hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do tonight." When you go from miss a single thing, we're going to be going from our C to our G to our F chord pretty quickly. And anytime you see that in this song, that's where we're going to be using a strumming pattern, too. So, let's go ahead and just practice it really quick. Let's put our C chord on. And what I want you to do is we're going to play the C chord on the left half of this pattern. So, we've got down, [singing and music] down, up. Then, we're going to switch chords. In this instance, we're going to change it to our G chord and then do the other half of the pattern. Down, down, up. All right. [music] So, a little bit faster. We've got C down, up, G, down, up. C, down, up, [music] G, down, up. All right. So, basically, we're going to stick this pattern in whenever we're doing faster chord transitions. So, let's go ahead and practice putting together strumming pattern one and strumming pattern two by doing this in the chorus. So, in the second half of the chorus, hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do tonight. I'm going to go ahead and put all of that on screen. What we're going to do is play strumming pattern one two times through for the F chord. Then, we're going to play strumming pattern one one time for the G chord. And then, when we go from our C to our G on miss a single thing, we're going to do strumming pattern two. So, let's go ahead and speed it up a little bit and put some of the singing in there. And I think it'll make a lot more sense for you. [singing] I don't want to miss a single thing you do. [music] All right. So, hopefully you can hear where to put that in. Like I said, I think that's exclusively where you'll see that in the um song. Maybe there's a few times in the verses where it also moves pretty quickly, but basically anywhere where those transitions are going to move a little bit quicker is where you want to use strumming pattern too. With that being said, let's go ahead and move into the last strumming pattern. All right, guys. So, our last strumming pattern, as you can see, is just five downstrums, and it's going to sound like this. All right, guys. So, this strumming pattern is basically really optional. Um, but I did want to show it to you guys because I think if you put it into the ends of phrases strategically, it really adds a lot to the overall cover and the overall song. So, let's go ahead and put our G chord on. And all you want to do is strum down five times. 1 2 3 4 [singing and music] 5. All right. And I'm just going to kind of quickly go through this one because you use it very seldomly in the song, but I like to use it at the end of the choruses. So, where we were just practicing, hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do tonight. So, right when you're about to go into the word tonight is where I would use this on the G chord. So, let's go ahead and put all of that back on screen again. On our F chord, we've got strumming pattern one. [singing and music] Strumming pattern two. [singing and music] Back to strumming pattern one. Then here on this G is where I would use strumming pattern three. D. All right. 1 2 3 [singing and music] 4 5. And so, like I said, I think all of these strummings, like these are just suggestions. If you want to, and you can, you could totally use strumming pattern one to play through the whole song. But I did just kind of want to show you what happens when you kind of mix and match the patterns within your song to kind of like build up the guitar and just give it a little bit more interest. But once you have all of that under your belt, let's go ahead and put everything together to play through the whole song. I'm dreaming of you see [music] [singing] myself in there. I want the world to see with [music] me. Hey, hey. Your lipstick stays on [singing] my left side. Do you want to have fun jamming to the rest of this 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 FastTrack and playalong tutorials. I'll make sure to put a link in the description box as well as this iCard right up here. All right, guys, but that does conclude my tutorial today. Thank you so much for watching and a huge thank you to my patrons for voting on this song for this month's patron picks. And a special shout out to my top patrons, Louise, [music] Mark, Pam, Tony, Cynthia, Joe, Paul, Ally, and Kristen. Thanks for watching, and I hope it helped. If it did, make sure to give me a thumbs up down below, as well as [music] subscribe to my channel. That way, you never miss out on any other new tutorials. 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 behindthe-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, um, yeah, that ends the video. So, thank you so much for watching. I hope it helped and I will see you in my next one. Bye. Tonight.