Sailor Song by Gigi Perez Tutorial/Lesson
Sailor Song
Cmaj7, Em, G6
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Video transcript
hey everyone it's Ellen here and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play sailor song by giigi Perez on the guitar I've been seeing requests for me to teach this song for the past several months all over my website in my comments section even on my patreon page so I thought I would come at you with a quick tutorial but first I wanted to quickly shout out journey instruments and all of their collapse of their travel guitars today I will be featuring their color changing of 660 model it goes from Blue to purple it's really super cool and of course it also collapses like all of their other guitars so if you are interested in the one that I'm playing today or any of the other ones I will make sure to leave that link 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 this song is pretty easy we only have three chord shapes to play through the whole thing um remember our Capo is here on the fourth fret if you want to be in the same key as the original song otherwise you can still apply these same three chord shapes it'll just be in a lower key but we're going to go ahead and start with our C major 7 which looks like this and sounds like this from there we have our E minor and then the last chord shape is our G6 and something to notice about all three of these chord shapes is we do only have to use our pointer and our index finger for all of them so all three of these chords are just two fingers all right so that should help with the ease of transitioning between these chords and then another piece of advice I have is for your C major 7 I like to take my thumb and kind of wrap it around the neck of the guitar so you can mute that low E string and that way when you strum you don't hear this low E string so just a piece of advice if you want to apply that and then same thing with our G6 I like to take the palm of my hand here and I'll barely kind of touch that high E string kind of to mute it also cuz I think the G6 sounds better if you don't let that E string ring all right so I'm just kind of taking my palm and like muting the E string with that but of course these muting techniques are totally optional just wanted to let you guys know about them in case you want to apply them as well uh but basically those are the only three chords you need to know to play through this song all right guys so go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to memorize these chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them the song is actually super beginner friendly because there's only these three chords for the entire song and they're pretty easy to transition between cuz they're all only just two fingers so um definitely pause if you need to and then when you come back we can talk about the strumming pattern that you can use for this song all right guys so there's only one strumming pattern that you need to learn and you can use it to play through the entire song which is great for beginners as you can see it's at the top here and we're going to count it like this with a 16th note count we have one E and A 2 e and a three e and a four E and A all right so down down down up down up down down up it can get really easy to get confused with the amount of you know times that we're doing all these down and up strums so definitely pause and play it slowly until you can kind of hear the beat a little bit more but basically what we're going to do is we're going to play this pattern through one time per chord for the C major 7 and the E minor chord and then on the G6 chord we're going to play this two times through and this going to be true for the entire song So this whole song is going to go from C major 7 to E minor to G6 so it's pretty easy to memorize as well some pieces of advice that I have for this particular shamming pattern in the way that she plays it that will help you with your overall performance are accents and Dynamics so let me go ahead and go over each of those whenever I say accent basically what I'm doing there is I'm giving a little extra emphasis to some of these beats so I'm going to go ahead and turn some of these arrows green we've got our one the and of the two and the four so now that these are green basically what you want to do is when you get to these strums you want to kind of strum them a little bit um with more emphasis than the rest of them and this is going to kind of do almost like a drum beat throughout the song so we have one and a 2 e and three e and a four and a all right down down up down down up down up down down up and another thing you can think about for accents is whenever we have our chord on so let's just put our C major 7 chord on the accented notes you're going to kind of to strum all the strings and then for the rest of the non- accented ones you can kind of just um concentrate your strums more on just a few of the strings okay so we have down down up down down up down up down down up and again I'm also kind of just using my wrist to give those accented beats a little bit more oomph behind them okay down down up down up down down up down down up if you can apply the accents throughout this song it will really help you not only keep track of where you're at with the strumming Rhythm but it'll also make it sound a lot like the original so one time through one of these little rounds we've got C major 7 we're going to play this one time down down up down up down down up to E minor one time down down up down up down down up then remember when we get to our G6 chord you're going to play this pattern through twice down up down up down down up down up down down up twice all right so remember those accents that'll really help you keep track in the song and then the second thing I was mentioning for this song is Dynamics now Dynamics is basically just how loud or soft you're playing and this is going to play such an important role in this particular song because since the strumming pattern and the chords and everything are all the same you want to kind of differentiate between different parts of the song by adding your Dynamics so basic basically when you do certain parts like for example the first verse it's a little quieter so you still want to have your Accents in but you just want to you know make your strums a little lighter but then like for example after the first verse we go into the chorus it's played exactly the same way we're just doing everything a little bit louder all right it's pretty subtle but if you can add those Dynamics in it really will help also make you keep track of the song and it just is overall very nice to listen to for the listener now besides keeping track of where you are at in the strumming Rhythm I think the other challenging part of this song will be just getting the tempo down or the speed of the song it does go quite fast so more at full Tempo it'll sound like this down down up down up down down up all right so that will take a little bit of practice on your end just to make sure that you can get that at Tempo but once you do we can put together everything in this little strumming section together to play through what would be the whole song so let's go go ahead and go through an example of the verse I saw her in the rightest way looking like and half the away laughing while she did her pen hel all right and then again for the chorus same thing the strumming the chords everything is the same we're just changing the Mel of our singing oh you kiss me on the m and me like and when you get a taste can you tell me what's my flavor I don't believe in God but I believe that you're my savior my mom says that she's worried but I'm covered in this favor all right so basically the whole song goes back and forth between the verses and the choruses and again the guitar is exactly the same for the entire song you just want to change the melody lines whenever you're singing um if you are interested in a print out of everything that I'm teaching in this tutorial today I do have that in the link in the description on my patreon page um but basically once you have this strumming down and you have those chords Down you're ready to go 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 Rhythm under your belt really the pattern itself is not that hard to get used to but what can get confusing like I said is where you're at in the strumming pattern so make sure to add those Accents in if you can and then also work up that speed so that you can get it at full Tempo cuz this song goes pretty fast but once you can get that we can go ahead and put everything we've learned in this video to play through the song one two ready go I saw her in the rightest way looking like and half the way laugh all right guys if you are interested in playing through the rest of this song with me or you want to print out the guide with the chords and lyrics and everything like that that is available on my patreon page which again I will link in the description box otherwise thank you so much for joining me for this guitar tutorial today I hope you have have a great rest of your day and I will see you in a new lesson coming out soon bye