Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett Tutorial/Lesson
Margaritaville
D, G, A, D7
Download Printable Guitar Guide
Unlock with Patreon
Watch play along cover
Unlock with Patreon
Are you new to playing the guitar? Watch my free Beginner Series where I show you all of the basics. You'll be playing your first songs in minutes!
Video transcript
Hey everyone, my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffet on the guitar. Today I am featuring my Orangewood Brooklyn guitar. So if you like what you see, I will link more information about it down below. Here's a quick overview of everything I'll be covering in this tutorial today. And with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. All right guys, so to play this whole song, you only need to know four different chord shapes. And we're going to start with our D 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, I do cover how to do that my free beginner series right here on YouTube. So, make sure to check that out right here. The next chord shape is our G major. We also have our A major. If you have trouble fitting your three fingers like this into A major, you can also play it like this with these three fingers. And then the last chord shape is our D7. However, I will label this kind of an optional chord. If you want to just stick with a regular D chord, that will work. Every time you see a D7, you could just play a regular D, in which case you only need to know three chords to play this song. Um, but even with the D7, it's just the four chords and you can play through the entire song. So, go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really memorize these chord shapes, as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them, cuz it will make learning the rest of the song so much easier for you. And if this is a skill you're currently struggling with, transitioning between these chords fast enough, I do have a practice with me chord transition series right here on my channel. So, I will link that in the corner for those of you who need it. But once you have these chords under your belt, then we can go ahead and talk about the strumming that you can use for this song. All right, guys. So, as I always say, if you are brand new to playing guitar or you're somebody who struggles with playing guitar while singing at the same time, the first thing I suggest doing is to bring up the song and go ahead and go through the entire thing with just a single downstrum on each chord change as you sing through the song. And you want to take this time to really get to know what word or what syllable you're on whenever those chords are changing. So, here's a quick example of what I mean. Wasting away again in Margarita Bell. Searching for my lo shaker song. All right, so that's just a really quick example, but you would essentially want to do that for the entire song and just really make sure you know where those chords are going to be changing. This actually something to do right now if you check out my Patreon page. I do have this entire guide available to download and print out. So, I'll make sure to leave that link in the description box. Um, but once you come back, we can go ahead and add to this to do more of a full strumming pattern that you can use for this song. All right, guys. So, today we do have a fairly beginner friendly strumming pattern to go with this beginner friendly song. Um, as you can see, we're going to count it in an eighth note count. So, it's going to sound like this. We have 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and down up down up down. All right, this is a super common strumming pattern that you can use for so many songs and it works really well with this one as well. And the great thing is you can play this strumming pattern and use it for the entire song. So basically the only tricky part about this strumming pattern is knowing how many times you need to repeat it per chord. And I have all of this listed on the guide that's on my Patreon page. However, if you're familiar with the song at all, it should be pretty natural about when you want to change chords. Okay, so let's go ahead and apply this strumming pattern to the intro. You can see here we're starting on our D chord. And for the intro, we're just going to play this pattern through one time per chord. So we've got D, down, down, up, up, down, up. Then you switch to your next chord, G. Same thing. Down, down, up, up, down, up to A. Down, down, up, up, down, up. And on D. All right. So that's how the strumming pattern goes al together. So without stopping, it would sound more like this. We've got D, G, A, D. All right. And that's about the tempo that we want to go to match the original song as well. So, it's not going incredibly fast. So, it's definitely doable if you're a beginner. Um, but let's go ahead and bring this into the verse and just see how it comes together with some singing. You can see in the verse here, we're just holding our D chord and our A chord for most of the verse. So, it's just going to sound like this. So, we've got D down, down, up, down, up. All right. And you're just going to repeat it as you sing the verse. On Sponge, watching the sun. All of us tourists cover with oil. See, we switch to our A chord here. Then we're staying on A for a long time. Drumming my sixth string on my front porch. Smell the shrimp. They're beginning on our D chord to our D7. All right. So, a breakdown of the verse there is we're on our D chord. We're going to keep that for six measures. Switch to your A chord for eight measures. And then we're gonna end on one measure of D and then one measure of D7. All right, so that's how you would play all the verses throughout this song. Now, let's go ahead and break down a chorus. Again, the strumming pattern is exactly the same. What changes is how many times we want to repeat it for these chords. So, on the chorus, we have G to A to D7. Wasted awake searching for my life shaker song. Some people claim there's a right here on Woman to Blame. Every time you come across this in this song, we're just going to do single downstrums on each of these chords. So, we've got D to A to G. All right. That there's a woman to blame, but I know back to strumming. It's nobody's fault. All right. And again, this is a prime example of how all of the choruses throughout this song will sound as well. So, basically, the song goes back and forth between verses and choruses, and we just went through each of those in this little section here. So, you just want to practice this until you can get those chord transitions down. And then once you have that, you can basically play through the entire song. All right, guys. So, again, go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to get this strumming pattern under muscle memory. That's when you can kind of play through it without counting it in your head anymore. That's going to be super important to be able to then sing on top of it. So, it's just going to take some practice. Um, so go ahead and pause and take as much time as you need for that, but once you get back, we can put together everything we've learned in this tutorial, those chords and the strumming pattern to play through the song. One, two, ready, go. On sponge cake, watching the sun bake. All of those tourists covered oil. Want to have fun jam the rest of the song with me? Yeah. 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 playalong guitar tutorials. I'll make sure to leave a link for it in the description box down below. If you enjoyed learning this song with me, then you should definitely check out this video. Not only does it have a super similar vibe and feel, but it's just as fun and easy to play. So, I'll see you over there. Bye.