I'm a Believer by The Monkees Tutorial/Lesson
I'm a Believer
G, D, C, D7, F
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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 i'm a believer by the monkeys on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something that you want to learn and just really quick if you're noticing anything different with my voice i do just want to say i'm feeling a little bit under the weather today but i still wanted to get this tutorial out for you guys so let's go ahead and jump into the overview all right so this song is going to be a super beginner friendly go ahead and make sure that your guitar is in standard tuning and to play this song in the original key you do not need to use a capo on top of that i'm going to be showing you five different cords today one of the chords is a bar chord which is an f chord but i will be showing you an alternate fingering for that barre chord and on top of that you only play it like a few times throughout the entire song so it's really not that intimidating if you're a beginner and on top of that i wanted to show you four different strumming patterns as well but one of them is like optional and you don't have to play it and then it really just kind of goes back and forth between two of them so with that being said let's go ahead and jump into how those chords look all right guys so i've gone ahead and zoomed in a little bit so we can take a closer look at these chords like i said there are only five chord shapes you need to know for the entire song 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 right now you can check out my beginner series episode 3 where i go in detail on how to read these with that being said let's go ahead and jump into our second chord which is our d chord and that looks like this and sounds like this next we have our c chord which looks like this and sounds like this after that we have our d7 chord which looks like this and sounds like this and then the last chord we have today is our bar chord which is f and that looks like this and sounds like this but of course as promised if bar chords are new or hard for you you can do an alternate fingering which looks like this and sounds like this uh but just to reiterate the f chord is used really seldomly in this song so don't let that freak you out from learning uh the rest of it alright guys so now that we've gone through the different chord shapes go ahead and pause the video and just take a few moments to memorize them if they're new to you as well as transition going back and forth between them this song in particular the chorus goes from g to c back and forth a lot so make sure you have that transition down if you need help with transitions i do go over that in my beginner series as well so you can check that video out right here but with that being said let's go ahead and jump into the strumming patterns that i wanted to show you for this song all right guys so let's go ahead and break down a little bit of these strumming patterns if you're brand new to guitar i would suggest starting out with a single down strum on the beat for every chord change i do think that this is a great way to get familiar with the song as well as practice singing and playing at the same time normally i refer to this as my practice pattern but i do use this in my cover as well so i'm going to call this strumming pattern one so let's go ahead and just do a really quick dive into how this would look if you have your chord transitions up for the first verse i'll put that on screen we're going from g to d to g and we're going to hold that second g twice and so all you want to do is do a single down strum for each of d those three four g two three four again two three four all right so if you pair that with the verse um lyrics you can kind of see how the song comes together so let's go ahead and do just a really quick example together one two ready go all right so you basically just want to take this one downstream pattern and apply it to the whole song just sing through it really quick make sure you know where those transitions are going to happen and make sure you're aware of which word you're singing or which syllable you're on whenever those transitions are happening it'll really help with these other strumming patterns moving forward if you need a printable guide to go through the whole song with all the lyrics and core transitions and all of that i do have that available on my patreon page so i will make sure to link that down in the description box below as well as in this i card right up here alright so once you've gone through the song with strumming pattern one we can go ahead and move on to strumming pattern two which as you can see is down up up down up and it's gonna sound a little something like this so let's try that together we'll go to our g chord and just play through this pattern a few times to let you get used to that rhythm so i'm gonna count us in you hop in whenever you feel comfortable one two three four down down up up down all right so once you have that rhythm kind of internalized a little bit then we can pair it with our chord transitions so again let me put that on screen what we're going to do is hold it once for g and d and then hold it twice for that second g one two ready go awesome so once you can kind of get that rhythm down and you've paired it with the chord progressions all we want to do now is speed it up a little bit to get it at tempo with the original song now this song does move kind of quickly so you really want to make sure that you have those chord shape transitions under your belt um but let's go ahead and jump into what this would sound like at full tempo i'll count using one two three four down down all right nice and so the place that i would suggest using this strumming pattern would be for all of the verses and you can kind of use it for an intro so at the beginning of the song you'll hear like an electric guitar solo i am not going to be going over that today but if you're playing this on acoustic you could just hold out your g for two measures then you would go ahead and start singing okay so um that's where i would use strumming pattern two but with that being said let's go ahead and jump into our third strumming pattern alright guys so as you can see our strumming pattern three is down down up down down up and it's gonna sound a little something like this so again i just want to start you guys out by getting used to that rhythm so let's put our g chords on and i just want to have you jump in and play this rhythm with me whenever you feel comfortable so i'll count us in one two three four down down up down down so hopefully this rhythm sounds pretty like smooth and easy for you basically the reason why i wanted to teach you this is because we're going to utilize this in the chorus where these transitions are going a little bit faster so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to put a vertical line halfway through this little strumming pattern so you'll see down down up on the left side down down up on the right side and what this vertical line is going to represent is where we're going to switch chords so if you look at the chorus we're going to go from g to c back and forth several times to play through this chorus so let's go ahead and practice that i have my g chord on and on the left side we're going to go down down up then you switch to your c chord down down up all right and for the chorus like i said it's just going to repeat itself for almost the entire thing so we have g down up c down up g down all right and so i know when you don't have the singing in there it might sound a little confusing how this fits into the song so let me go ahead and do the chorus for you so you can hear how that comes together then i saw her face all right so you can see there it is moving a little bit faster than the previous strumming pattern but you're just going back between g and c so make sure you have that transition down pat but that's basically how you do the whole chorus and so from there i kind of just wanted to touch on the end of the chorus so this is where we're going to bring back strumming pattern one which was that single down strum pattern so you would say not a trace i couldn't leave her if all right so the course is gonna kind of combine all of the different strumming patterns that i'm teaching you here today but you can just kind of think of it as strumming pattern two is the main pattern for the verses strumming pattern three which we're just going over now is the main pattern for the choruses with that being said i do have one more strumming pattern to teach you guys it is totally optional but i wanted to include it because this is the way that i like to play my cover so let's go ahead and jump into that alright guys the last strumming pattern i have for you today is strumming pattern four as you can see it's down down up down up down and it's gonna sound a little something like this now like i said it's totally optional to play this because it is used pretty seldomly in the song but where i think it sounds really good is at the end of all the verses so for instance the verse one disappointment haunted all my dreams okay on the dreams word we're gonna be holding our d7 chord so you could just hold strumming pattern two here which is what you'll be using for the verse anyway so it'd be like that sounds perfectly fine you can totally do that however something that i think builds into the chorus would be to use this strumming pattern for so on the d7 chord there is where i like to put this so we're on strumming pattern two on our c chord down down up up down up then you go to your g chord down down up down up then here on the d7 chord is where you would use this fourth strumming pattern down down up down up down up down and then i like to just slap my strings to give that a mute because you want to like stop all the music before you jump into the chorus and that'll sound a lot like the original so again on that d7 chord we have down down up down up down mute all right so let me go ahead and show you how this sounds in context with the end of the verses all right with singing it would sound like this and i saw her face and then you would go into strumming pattern three for the chorus so again this one is totally optional just stick on strumming pattern two if that's what you're comfortable with but if you add this in i think it does build the song up and it sounds really nice moving into the chorus um but with that being said those are the four strumming patterns that i wanted to show you that i do like to use in my cover so let's go ahead and put everything we learned together to play through the whole song then i saw her face ready go 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 tutorials i'll make sure to leave a link in the description box below as well as in this icard right up here alright guys but that does it for me in this tutorial today i really hope that it helped you if it did make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well as subscribe to my channel that way you never miss out on any other new tutorials a special shout out goes out to all of my top patrons over on my patreon page i'll have all of their names listed on screen right now you guys are awesome and also a huge thank you to all of my patrons over on patreon for supporting my channel and making tutorial videos just like this one possible 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 those out they'll be linked in the description but yeah that ends my tutorial today so thank you so much for watching i really hope that it helped you and i will see you in my next video bye you