Stand By Me by Ben E. King Tutorial/Lesson
Stand By Me
G, Em, C, D
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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 Stand By Me by Benny King on the guitar so stay tuned to this is something that you'd like to learn and really quick before we jump into the tutorial I just wanted to take a second to thank today's sponsor and new music I will actually be using their next g guitar in this tutorial today so if you're interested in learning more about it I will link it down below so let's go ahead and jump straight into the overview this is going to be a super beginner friendly song So if you are new to guitar this is the perfect song to learn for you but first of all let's go ahead and talk about our guitar you will need it to be in standard tuning and go ahead and put your Capo on the second fret if you want to play in the same key as the original song I only have four chords to show you today and they are all open shaped so it's really easy to play as well as one simple strumming pattern that you can use to play through the entire song at the end I will also show you a solo tab that you can kind of hear throughout it but it's totally optional so you don't have to learn that if you don't want to but with all of that being said let's go ahead and jump into the tutorial and we're going to start with the chord alright guys so I've zoomed in a little to take a closer look at these chords like I said there are only four shapes to play through the whole song and we're going to start with our G which looks like this and sounds like this and by the way if you don't know how to read these chord charts that you're seeing on screen I Do cover how to do that in my beginner series episode three so I will link that right here for those of you who need it the next chord shape is our E minor we have our c chord and the last chord you need to know is d and those are the only four chords you need to know to play through this song So if you are a beginner I would recommend to go ahead and pause the video take a few minutes to memorize those chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them it'll make learning the rest of the song that much easier but once you've done that we can go ahead and talk about the strumming now if you're brand new to playing guitar the first thing I would suggest doing before jumping into the strumming pattern is to go through the song with a practice pattern which as you can see is just a single down strum and what you want to do is play that single down strum for every chord change that you see throughout the song and practice singing through the song so that you're aware of what word you're singing whenever those chords are changing so for example let's go ahead and put up the first verse here on screen you just want to play each of these chords once as you sing through it when the night has come and the land is dark and the Moon is the only light we'll see all right so you basically want to do that for the entire song I will tell you the best thing about this song is that chord order that we just played in is the same throughout the song So it repeats in that exact same order and if you notice the c and the D chord go a little bit faster so we're basically holding our G and our E minor chord twice and then we're going to do our C and our d chord just one time so this is something that you'll pick up on as you do the single down strum and it stays true throughout this entire song so that's another reason why this is so beginner friendly so anyways you can go ahead and do that right now I actually have this whole guide available on my patreon page which you can print out and download so I would definitely recommend checking that out I will make sure to link it in the description box down below but once you've done that let's go ahead and talk about the actual strumming pattern that you can use to play through this song Alright guys so the full strumming pattern I would recommend for this song is our famous down down up up down up and it's going to sound like this foreign so basically all you want to do with this strumming pattern is that we are going to repeat it twice for our G and our E minor chords and we're only going to play through it once for our C and our d chord so like I said earlier the structure of this song stays the same throughout the whole thing so let's just go ahead and take a closer look at it I'm going to put our chord progressions here on screen on your G chord you're going to play through the strumming pattern twice so we have down down up up down up twice then you go to your E minor chord we're going to repeat this twice again down up up down up repeat then here on the C and D chords we're only going to play through this pattern one time so C goes down down up up down up switch straight into D down down up down up then you end on G and again you repeat this twice so if you could play through that with me right now that's the whole song it just repeats itself as you sing through it so you basically want to go through this and speed it up a little bit until you can play it at Tempo that'll sound more like this one two ready go down up up down up down down up down up one two and four and one two and four here awesome so if you can get it at that Tempo then you just gotta practice putting those chord transitions in and after you do that you play through the whole song and like I said it repeats throughout the whole thing so let's go ahead and bring the verse back up here and just go through an example so you're going to start with this chord progression remember G is twice E minor is twice C and D are each once so let's go ahead and go through this one two ready go twice Diner twice C is what D is what back to back just as long as you stand Stand By Me awesome great job so the other thing to remember is this exact same swimming pattern with this exact same cord order can be applied to the course as well and you can basically play through the whole song right now with those four chords and that strumming pattern however as promised I did want to show you guys that cool little like solo tab that you can hear throughout the song this is totally optional but I do think it sounds really cool and it adds a lot to the cover if you wanted to do that so let's go ahead and zoom in so I can show you how to do this all right guys so this tab is also pretty beginner friendly and the best thing is you only have to learn it once because it does repeat throughout the entire song so if you do need help with how to read guitar tabs I actually have a separate video right here that explains how to do that so make sure to check that out if you need a little extra help but let's go ahead and jump right into it so you can see here we're going to start on our open G string so you're going to pick that twice then you're going to go next door to your open D string pick that once then we have our fourth fret on our D string and I would recommend using your ring finger for this so we have open fourth fret then you go right back to your open G string again open open so that's that first little section all right so hopefully you're kind of hearing the song Come Together from here we're going to go to our open G again and then go back to your fourth fret on your D string with your ring finger then we have our second fret on our D string and this I would recommend using your pointer finger for okay and you play that twice then you play open D then put your first finger back on all right so the second little part goes like this all right good you're halfway there let's go ahead and go through this third little section you're gonna stay on your D string with your first pointer finger on the second fret pick that once and then open then you're gonna go next door to your a string and we're going to play the third fret and for this I would recommend using your middle finger so you're going to play that three times then you want to go back over to your D string second fret with your pointer finger then open twice right so that third little section goes like this all right good and then to finish it out the last little section here is exactly like the beginning section so you're starting with your open D string open fourth fret with your ring finger then open G and then again and it sounds a little unfinished because you would basically go back to the beginning of this tab and then start all over so if we put all of it together it would sound like this all right so that's the whole tab you can repeat this throughout the whole song If you have someone to play with it's really fun to have someone do the tab someone else do the strumming um or if you want to kind of start with the intro tab and then go into the strumming that's fun too for my little cover here at the end I will kind of do picture in picture and show you how both of those come together for this song um but with that being said let's go ahead and play through the entire song two one two ready go wanna have fun playing 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 I card right up here alright guys but I think that ends my tutorial for today so thank you so much for watching I really hope that it helped you if it did make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well subscribe to my channel that way you never miss out on any other new guitar tutorials another thank you goes out to any music for sponsoring today's video as well as a special shout out to my top patrons over on my patreon page I will make sure to have all of their names listed on screen right now and of course I thank you goes out to all of my patrons for supporting my channel and making videos just like it's impossible you guys are awesome here are my social media sites in case you'd like to follow me on any of those that's just where I do fun things like behind the scenes looks at things coming up I'll pull you guys on what you want to learn next and I'll even do giveaways on there a few times a year so make sure to check it out but I think that ends the video so thank you so much for watching I really hope that it helped and I will see you in my next one coming out really soon bye foreign