Royals by Lorde Tutorial/Lesson
Royals
D, C, G
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
Hi, my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play royals by Lorde on the guitar So stay tuned if this is something that you'd like to learn I Cut my teeth on [wedding] rings This song is going to be really great for beginners because if you want to sing it in the same key as lord, you [will] not need a capo at all and There's also only three chords to play the entire song and they're all like basic chords with easy fingerings so it should be pretty fun and Yeah, so let's go ahead and get started with this corner That's been on Everybody's [like] it's only that done so the first chord you need to know is D Which looks like this and sounds like this? Right after that you need to know see which looks like this and sounds like this And then the last chord you need to know is g which looks like this And sounds like this All right, and those are the only three chords you need to know for this song Okay, so once you have those chords memorized and you can transition between them And you know the fingerings and things like that for the chords then let's go ahead and move on and I want to show you guys a strike Pattern I have to show you guys is a little bit detailed But we can break it up into smaller sections so that I can explain it to you and the cool [thing] about this strumming pattern is that You can use it for the entire Song and all you do is kind of change the [way] your right hand is playing and it'll make it sound completely different So let's go ahead and go into what I mean by that so before we get into [being] more detailed or complicated strumming Let's go ahead and go [through] the entire song and just play each chord once with a [downstroke] And I always suggest you do this first just so you know where you're doing those transitions So let's go ahead and go through the beginning together, and I'll show you what I mean I've never seen it I cut my teeth on wedding rings I'm not lying and then sort of town no postcode so you pretty much just want to take that through the entire song and just don't worry too much about strumming to strum it once on a downstroke and do the entire song so you know where all those transitions are and Once it makes sense to you, and [you] kind of know where to expect them, then let's go ahead and continue And I will take you through a strumming pattern that you can use for the entire song okay? So for this strumming pattern I'm going to go ahead and give you the [entire] pattern right here. [I] know that This is kind of a lot but Um like I said earlier if you learn this strumming pattern you can use it for the verses as well as the choruses and you Can make it sound just a little bit different by adding a palm mute But we'll go into that in just a second [so] [why] don't you guys go ahead and put your d chord [on] and try to play this through with me? We have It's a lot I know but once you get the rhythm it'll sound a lot better one more time so a lot of the times in this pattern whenever you play the upstroke it's going to be kind of like an afterthought of a down stroke It's almost like a secondary [beat]. So now let's go ahead and work on that rhythm a little bit. We have down down up up down down down down down So you can kind of hear when you put it in rhythm that most of the upstroke serve as kind of like a filler The main beat that you hear is going to come from your down strokes So the reason why the up strokes are kind of important is just so when you put it all together It'll make your guitar sound a little bit more full with all of the chords that you'll be playing I know that this strumming pattern is a little bit more complicated than some of my other tutorials But it is very versatile because we can change it up so much once we understand how to do it So the other thing that's really great about this song is that The chord Progression is pretty much the same it's going to go from D to C to g for the entire song and what you're going to do is you're going to hold this pattern out twice for D and Then play it once for C and g So let's go ahead and go through an example [go] in for your d [chord] on. We're Gonna play the strumming Pattern twice down Then we switch to our C Chord and we play it through [once] down down down [up] down down up and then [switch] to G and play it through once So let's put all [of] that together We're going to play through the strumming Pattern twice for D once for C and once for g you ready? [you] Hi you All right, so once you get that down that's going to stay the same throughout the entire song [and] will never be Let me live that fantasy okay, so now let's discuss how to change up this strumming pattern to make it sound a little bit different so we can kind of Distinguish between when we're playing the pre-Chorus versus the Chorus So the only thing I'm going to change about this pattern to help me distinguish that is I'm going to add a little bit of A palm mute with my playing my right playing hand and all I'm doing is wow I'm strumming this I'm going to rest the side of my hand against the strings um I have a lot of people commenting about how this is kind of hard So I will definitely make a tmt tutorial for you guys about how to improve on this But just for now just know that it doesn't sound so pretty when you do it at this tempo But when you speed it up, it kind of makes it more percussive And it has a very cool rhythm when you do it faster So make sure that when you're practicing through the strumming pattern You kind of speed it up a bit before you try putting in the palm mute But let's go ahead and go through what an example [of] that would sound like with this pattern but also with aplomb you So we have D You'll notice that the cool thing about adding this [pamyu] is that now whenever we're playing a downstroke It's kind of muted but then when you play the upstroke your hand should not be muting the strings anymore So when you play an upstroke it'll kind of rain, so we have down [Vs.]. Oh Okay, so now let's practice through what the pre-chorus would sound like with our mute and also with all of those chord transitions with this Strumming pattern you ready let's put down our D chord [and] we have down down down down everybody's Playing violin tigers a little you don't care [all] right, awesome So now just remember that when we play through the song you can use those you know one down stroke strumming the practice drawing Pattern for whenever you're transitioning between A verse and a chorus and then between the pre-chorus and the chorus we're going to do a palm mute on the pre-chorus But then we're going to let it ring for the chorus [and] I think that adding in all these different details will really help distinguish each part of the song from We don't care and will never be In the original song when lord is singing it you know the beginning Starts out more as a rhythm. There's not really many chords, so if you do this for performance I would suggest maybe trying to mimic the [original] song by doing a sort of percussive beat on your guitar And you can kind of tap on it And it'll make different sounds and you can kind of experiment with that if you're planning on doing a cover [I'll] have a little box right here as me making that percussive sound But I'll also show you what it would sound like if you played along [with] it [we'll] never be Together and play through the entire song this is royals by Lorde I've never seen [it] done. I cut my teeth I'm not in the torn up town Every songs like gold teeth grey goose trippin in the bathroom blood stains ball gowns trashin the hotel room. We don't care We're [trying] to [like] [pin] [on] everybody's like Holy sh. We don't care Fair and we'll never be Everybody's like I don't care I will never be Let me list that fantasy All right, that was roiled by [Lorde] Congratulations for playing through it. It's not that hard right, so thank you guys so much for watching my tutorial Please make [sure] [to] check out my other tutorials Here these are going to be more detailed and a little bit more for intermediate level guitar players Or if you're comfortable with this level of guitars then definitely click on this playlist And it will take you to more simple tutorials Just like this one that you can check out as I always say please make sure to [like] this video down below if you found It helpful as well as subscribe to my channel so that you know every time I upload a new video Thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye Let me lift that fantasy