Island in the Sun by Weezer Tutorial/Lesson
Island in the Sun
Em, Am, D, G, C
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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 island in the sun by weezer on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something that you'd like to learn all right guys so first thing is first i am using an electric guitar in this tutorial today however if all you have is an acoustic you can follow this tutorial all the way through exactly as is on your acoustic guitar and it'll play exactly the same but that being said let's go ahead and jump into the tutorial all right guys so today's tutorial is going to be classified as super beginner friendly to play the song in the original key we're going to be in standard tuning and you do not need a capo to play this in the original key on top of that you only need to know five chords to play through the whole song and none of them are barre chords and i'm going to show you a few different strumming patterns that you can use and will kind of go from like easiest to harder so that you can kind of choose where you're at in that journey and um i also wanted to teach you one solo line so with all of that being said let's go ahead and jump in and start with the chords alright guys so i've gone ahead and zoomed in to take a closer look at these chords like i said you only need to know five to play through the whole song and we're going to start with our e minor chord which looks like this and sounds like this and by the way if you don't know how to read these chord charts i will link a video right up here that talks about how to read chord charts as part of my beginner series so check that out if you need to after that we have our a minor chord which looks like this and sounds like this next you'll need to know your d chord which looks like this and sounds like this after that we have our g chord which looks like this and sounds like this and then the last chord you need to know is your c chord which looks like this and sounds like this and those are the only five chords you need to know for this song now if you are new to guitar i would recommend to pause the video and just take a few minutes to memorize these chord shapes and practice transitioning back and forth between them the song is pretty repetitive which is good so we're going to be mostly going from e minor to a minor to d to g that's going to be the progression for like 95 of the song so as long as you can smoothly transition to those four chords you should be fine but go ahead and take some time to practice that and when you're ready we can go into the strumming patterns that i want to show you for this song all right guys so now let's talk a little bit about the strumming patterns that i would recommend for this song if you are a complete beginner i would go ahead and recommend that you just go through the whole song with one simple down strum and kind of sing through it just to make sure you're used to where those transitions are going to be but today let's go ahead and jump into our first strumming pattern so as you can see strumming pattern one is down down up down down up and it's gonna sound a little something like this now what we're going to do with this strumming pattern is i'm going to put a vertical line here in the middle and that's just going to kind of break it in half and the reason we want to do that is because we're going to be changing chords in the middle of this strumming pattern so on the left side of down down up we have one chord and on the right side we have another chord so let's go ahead and take our chord progression for most of the song which is our e minor to a minor to d to g the way we would pair that with this strumming pattern is we have our e minor on the first side so down down up then you would switch to your next chord a minor down down up then you switch out those chords so next on the left side we've got d down down up and then you're gonna finish it out with your g chord down up alright so hopefully you can see how we're splitting those chords in half so the whole thing would be like this e minor a minor d g down so you can probably already hear the song coming together a little bit so go ahead and pause the video if you want to practice that a little bit more on your own but this progression matched with this pattern can be used to play through the whole song so let me go ahead and show you how that would sound we have our e minor chord on we're going to go down down up a minor to d to g and we're just going to repeat that for most of the songs all right and it just repeats itself over and over for most of the song the only place that it changes is the bridge but i will show you that with another strumming pattern so that is strumming pattern one it's probably the most simple pattern that you can use for this song and you can like i said play it through the entire song with just this pattern however i wanted to show you another pattern that's a little bit harder with the rhythm but we'll do something cool with it in a second so let's go ahead and go through strumming pattern two all right guys so as you can see strumming pattern two is up down up down down up and it's gonna sound something like this all right and again what i'm going to do is put another vertical line kind of splitting this in half a little because we are going to be changing chords halfway through again but what you'll notice is a little bit different about this pattern is that when you do your first up down up there's less of a pause before you have to switch to your next chord so it goes up down up down down up so it kind of leans into the second half so that's what's going to be a little bit harder about this rhythm versus strumming pattern one however you can again use this pattern for the entire song as well so let me just go ahead and show you what it would sound like with our chord changes so we have our e minor chord on you'd go up down up on your e minor then switch to a minor and finish it out down down up then on d you would do that again up down up to your g down down up and again the rhythm's gonna play a huge important role in this strumming pattern so without stopping it'll sound like this all right and i'm only slapping it to mute it there so that you can really clearly hear the rhythm we've got up down up down down up rest up down up down down all right so again you could use this strumming pattern through the entire song if you wanted to it'll be a little bit harder since you're starting on an offbeat but the reason why i wanted to show you strumming pattern two is because what i like to do is actually combine it with strumming pattern one so if you're a beginner at guitar i would recommend to just go ahead and use strumming pattern one through the whole song it'll be the easiest that way however if you practice it a lot that way and becomes really comfortable to you then go ahead and try to combine it with strumming pattern two so um if you combine strumming patterns one and two together i do think that it sounds the most accurate to the song so let me show you all the way through what that would sound like on our e minor chord we would do the down down up from strumming pattern one then you'd go to your a minor and you're just going to play the down down from strumming pattern one and then here on the up chord or on the up strum you're gonna go to your d up down up so basically what we're doing there is we're taking the d and we're like picking up that last up strum from strumming pattern one and like hooking it over to the beginning of strumming pattern two so hopefully you can see that so e minor is down down up a minor is down down go ahead and switch to d early up up down up and then you end on your g down down up all right so i'll put vertical lines here to kind of have help you separate it visually so again we have down down up down down up up down up down down up so the only thing that we're changing with the chords the chord change is going to be the d it's going to pick up that extra up strum so it's going to come in it's going to sound like it's coming in a little early so we have down up down down up up down all right so hopefully that sounds pretty accurate to you as well when you put that in with the song you'll see how it kind of all fits together so let me show you what that sounds like with the song is all right so hopefully you can hear that come together like i said this is a little bit more advanced with rhythm and strumming so if you're a beginner just stick with strumming pattern one however if you do want to be a little more adventurous with your strumming then go ahead and try to combine both of these okay so that is the full strumming pattern again if you are a little bit more advanced one last thing that you can do is add a little bit more of a chucking like uh muting kind of sound okay so what i'm going to do now to this pattern is i'm going to replace some of these down strums with an asterisk and what that asterisk represents is just like a chucking motion so basically you're muting your strings on your left hand and you're just kind of making a sound this will work on acoustic as well you just want to kind of make a chugging sound there so when you're doing that in the strumming pattern you would go on e minor down chuck up all right down chuck up you can do this with your left fretting hand some people like mute it with their fingers and stuff like that i'm not too good at that what i actually do is i'll do it with my right hand okay so with the palm of my pick hand i'll just strum and then on the next strum i'll take the side of my hand and like kind of like as i'm strumming down i'll also mute the strings all right so you've got down chuck up on the e minor then on a minor we have down chuck okay down chuck on the d we have up chuck up again that's up up chuck up and then on g we have down chuck up all right so if you put that all together it would sound more like this all right so you can kind of see how we're combining strumming pattern one and two and we're adding in some of these like chuggings okay so we have down up up down up down down all right so hopefully you can kind of hear how this is adding a bit of percussiveness and that'll help move and drive the song forward a little bit so if you are up for it i would recommend adding that in and you can use that for the entire song as well all right so you could use that for the whole thing but again if you are a beginner at guitar and this is all very overwhelming to you go ahead and just stick with that very first strumming pattern we went through it'll sound great for the entire song as well and with that being said let's go ahead and move into the last strumming pattern alright guys so strumming pattern three as you can see is just down down down up and it's gonna sound a little something like this now this pattern is used very seldomly in the song the only place that i would recommend using it is during the bridge where the song kind of changes chord progressions a little bit so at the bridge we'll run away together we'll spend some time forever the chords change here the order of the chords so we're going to go from d to g to d to g okay and so what you're gonna do is play this pattern through one whole time for each of these chords so on d we have down down down down up then to g down down down down up back to d down down down down up back to g down down down down up let's go ahead and finish out the bridge you're gonna go to your c chord same strumming pattern down down down down up to your a minor down down down down up then we're gonna end on our d chord and we're gonna play this through twice down down down down up twice all right so that's how you play the entire bridge let me go ahead and speed it up just a little bit and show you what it sounds like with the singing the other strumming pattern okay so again strumming pattern three i would just use it during the bridge those few times that we get to it during the song but i did still want to show you the solo riff that you kind of hear halfway through it's actually pretty easy to play so let's go ahead and zoom in so i can show you that anymore all right guys so i've zoomed in again so we can take a closer look at this little solo like i said it's actually pretty easy to play um so let me go ahead and just kind of show you what i do for the solo and you know how you can modify it for yourself so what we're gonna do is start with our first or pointer finger on the seventh fret of the g string then you're gonna go to the ninth fret and so i like to use my ring finger and then take it off and go back to your seventh fret all right so seven nine seven on the g string and then i like to reach over with my pinky and we're gonna be on the tenth fret of the d string so next door neighbor then i'll go with my ring finger on the ninth fret again then your pinky back on and then off all right so that's the first half of this solo and again i'm just going seven nine seven ten nine ten nine and with my fingers that's pointer ring pointer pinky ring pinky ring now if you have bigger hands than me and you can stretch further please feel free to play around with this tablature with you know other fingers that are more comfortable for you since my hands are rather small and my fingers are kind of short this is just what's most comfortable for me so feel free to follow me if you want to or you know feel free to find other fingerings but again that's seven nine seven ten nine ten nine what i'm doing there is i i'm doing just like a vibrato you can either just like take your ring finger and kind of wiggle it around or i've seen some people also do vibrato by shaking the string up and down whichever one's more effective or easier for you so all right that's the first half so from here i'm going to take my middle finger and go down to my seventh fret here on the d string so i'm kind of stretching a little bit to like get down there so i'm going from my ring to my middle finger we're going to play seven and then i'm using my pinky for nine back to seven all right so kind of the same as earlier and then from here i'm gonna use my middle finger to slide down to the fifth fret from the seventh while it's still ringing so i'm picking the seventh with my pick and i'm sliding down to the fifth right so you have to do that kind of fast so that you can still hear the tone okay so we've got seven nine seven slide and then from here i'll just do the fourth fret with my first finger or my pointer finger and then put my middle finger back on five five all right so the second half is like this seven nine seven slide four five five or with fingers that would be middle pinky middle slide pointer middle middle and again you could add that vibrato on the end there so in rhythm it would go like this all right and that's the whole solo riff you're just going to want to repeat that twice during the middle of the song so let's do the whole thing all together now you're going to start over here on your g string move over to your d vibrato if you want to or you can and then staying on your d string slide all right so all together without stopping in rhythm and then repeat all right and that is an easy way to play the solo so if you want to add that into your cover feel free that's how i would recommend playing it again you can experiment with your own fingering if you have a different way that you would like to fret that but that is the solo riff so now let's go ahead and put everything together one two three four um want to 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 playlong tutorials i'll make sure to leave a link in the description box below as well as in this i card right up here alright guys but that wraps up my tutorial for today so thank you so much for watching if it helped make 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