Imagine by John Lennon Tutorial/Lesson
Imagine
C, Cmaj7, F/C, Dm, G, G7, E, E7
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Video transcript
hey everyone my name is Ellen and today let's learn how to play Imagine by John Lennon on the guitar here's a quick overview of everything I'll be covering in this video today and with that being said let's go ahead and get started alright guys so we only have eight chords to play through this song and we're gonna go ahead and start with our C major which looks like this and sounds like this and by the way if you don't know how to read these chord charts you're seeing on screen make sure to check out my free beginner course right here the next chord is our C Major seven after that we have our F over c chord then we have our D minor chord next is our G major chord then we have our G7 chord thank you we also have our e major chord and then the last chord you need to know is your E7 chord those are the eight chords you need to know to play this song so go ahead and pause the video and just take a few minutes to memorize these chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them it'll make learning through the rest of the song so much easier and if transitioning fast enough between chords is something that you're struggling with right now I would definitely recommend checking out my practice with me Series where we go through the skill together but once you've done that we can go ahead and talk about the strumming now the first thing I would suggest doing is going through the whole song singing through it and doing a single down strum for every chord change and just get used to where those chords are going to be transitioning so here's a quick example of what that would look like imagine there's no heaven it's easy if you try right so just from doing those two lines you can already tell that the C and the C Major seven chords are going to be going twice as fast or feel like they're going twice as fast as that F over c chord so this is all stuff that you'll figure out when you do the whole song with a single Downstream practice pattern so I would recommend doing that right now if you would like a downloadable guide that you can print out right now and practice this with then make sure to check out my patreon page I'll make sure to leave a link in the description box down below alright guys so as you can see strumming pattern one is super straightforward we're just doing four down strums so let's go ahead and zoom in and talk a little bit about this Rhythm alright guys so basically all we're doing here is doing a single down strum on every quarter note or like beat of the measure so we have four beats per measure so you're just doing one down strum per beat so if we start right at the beginning of the song we have C to C Major seven to F over C what you want to do is for the first two down strums strum your c chord one two then I'm going to add a little vertical line here that's going to signal to you to switch chords so we're going to go to our C Major seven three four and then when you go to your F over c chord you do this for the full measure one two three four all right so all together without stopping it goes C Major seven F over C two three four repeat C major seven F over C you got it imagine there's no Heaven two three four it's easy if you try to three four all right so you could use this strumming pattern to play through the entire song because it is piano based I think it sounds really good with it but the place that I actually like to use this is in the choruses we have a few places where we're going to be transitioning our chords a little faster so you may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one you can see there we go from C to C Major seven to e to E7 so this is where I would use strumming pattern one with a single down strum for each of those so we have F over C you may say I'm uh and then here on the word dreamer you would do one down strum for each of these chords Dreamer all right so we have one two three four C C Major seven e e seven all right and that's basically the only place that I would use this first strumming pattern because I actually like to use a second strumming pattern for the rest of the song so let's go ahead and talk about strumming pattern two all right guys so here's strumming pattern two it might look a little bit more intimidating but I promise the rhythm is very straightforward so let's go ahead and zoom in and talk about it alright guys so for this strumming pattern we are going to be counting it with a 16th note Rhythm if you don't know what that is or don't know how to count that make sure to check out my free beginner course because we do go over that but basically we have one two and a three four and a all right so it's gonna sound like this one two and a three four and a down down down up down down up all right and just like how we talked about with strumming pattern one you do want to split this pattern in half on those chords that split in the middle of the measure so for example we have our C major chord we're going to do the first half of this pattern down down up then we have our C Major seven chord for the rest of it down down up then for your F over C you want to hold it out for the whole measure down up down down down down up all right so without stopping it would sound like this C major seven C down down up down down down up C Major seven F over C you just got it like that it's easy if you try all right and I again could you you could use this through the entire song where I like to use it is in the pre-choruses so let's bring that up you would just do the pattern exactly how we just practiced with that split in the middle so we have F over c c E minor G you want to hold it out for the whole pattern and then for G7 I like to do a single down strap all right so with singing it would sound like this imagine all the people living for today and that's basically where I like to use that strumming pattern for the verses there's a very iconic piano line that I figured out kind of how to do on guitar pretty easily so for the verses I actually like to do a picking pattern or a tab so let's go ahead and talk about that now before we jump into picking go ahead and pause the video and just take a few minutes to practice these strumming rhythms and really get them internalized the more you can play through them without having to think about the rhythms the easier it'll be to add in the singing later if you're struggling with this or anything else we've covered in this video so far transitions chord shapes strumming Rhythm anything like that you can always send me a video clip of you practicing your guitar or asking me whatever questions you have and I will send you a response back that is just one of the perks that I offer through my patreon page so I would definitely recommend taking a few minutes to check that out if you're interested I'll make sure to link it down below but with that being said let's go ahead and talk about the picking pattern alright guys so as you can see I have the tab of how to do this picking pattern on screen but first of all if you're unfamiliar with with how to read tabs I did make a video on how to read guitar tabs right here so make sure to check that out first and then come back but once you know how to read tabs let's go ahead and just kind of break this down so with your left hand you can see above the tab here we have the chord shapes listed so we're going to do our C our C major 7 and our F over C the thing that you might need a little more help with is your right hand so what I want you to do is go ahead and put your c chord on on your left hand your thumb is going to go on the root note so that's the third fret of the a okay your thumb is going to stay there and then your pointer middle and ring finger are going to go on the D G and B strings respectively and then what you want to do is pick all three of those at once and then follow it up with your thumb all right and we're just going to go back and forth like that all right once you get used to how that feels you want to do that twice then we're going to go to our C Major seven chord so go ahead and take off that pointer finger and it's the same exact pattern all right so we go C Major seven then you go to your F over c chord on your left hand and again your fingers on your right hand are not moving same pattern so here we're doing it three times and on that fourth beat we're gonna do a little kind of a frill here so what I want you to do on your left hand is take off all your fingers except for your middle finger and on your right hand you're going to also take your middle finger pick that g string and then while it's ringing you're gonna hammer on to your third fret with your ring finger on that G string then take your ring finger on your right hand you can pick up that open B next door so we have hammer on open string all right so F over C the whole thing goes like this all right it can take a little getting used to especially if you're new with you know any of these techniques so go ahead and take your time to learn that but once you have that under your belt the actual pattern is pretty simple so we have C Major seven F over C hammer on then you just repeat it again and then once you've repeated those two measures three times on the fourth time you're going to do something different with your F over C so on the last time you're going C Major seven then you're just going to hold your F over c chord two three four all right so we're not doing that little frill the very last time because from there we're going to go into the pre-chorus and then that's when the strumming would come in all right so let's go ahead and put this picking tab through from the beginning and see how that goes with the singing imagine it's easy if you try never saw the sky hold three four and then we would go into strumming imagine oh okay so basically that's how I would play through that little picking kind of tab piano like portion towards the beginning and through the verses of course it is totally optional so you could always opt to do strumming throughout the entire song instead so go ahead and pause and practice this picking slash tab portion if you want to and then once you have that under your belt we can play through the song one two ready go thank you imagine there's no heaven it's easy if you try Wanna Have Fun jamming 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 guitar tutorials I'll make sure to leave a link in the description box down below as well as in this icard right up here if you liked learning this song with me then you should definitely check out this video it's got a really similar Vibe and it's just as easy to play so I'll see you over there bye