Stay With Me by Sam Smith Tutorial/Lesson
Stay With Me
C, F, Am, Dm, G
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Video transcript
hi my name is Ellen and today I wanted to show you guys how to play Stay With Me by Sam Smith on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something that you'd like to learn guess it's true I'm not good at don't all right so aside from one B chord this song is going to be really great for beginners because there's only three chords that you absolutely need to know and also there's no capo and it's in standard tuning so everything is very basic and um yeah let me go ahead and jump into it and I'll show you guys how to play those chords oh won't you stay with me all right so there are only three chords you absolutely have to know to play this song but there are also some optional chords you can use to dress up the song a little bit but I'm going to go ahead and start off by showing you the required chords so the first chord you need to know is C which looks like this and sounds like this okay after that you need to know F which looks like this and sounds like this if barring this first um fret is a little bit hard you can always move this finger and just play the B string so now your fingering will look like this and your chord will sound like this and then the last chord you absolutely have to know is a minor which looks like this and sounds like this and so now I'm going to jump into some optional chords that you can use to dress up the song the first one is D Minor which looks like this and sounds like this and then the second optional chord is a g which looks like this and sounds like this now keep in mind for the rest of this tutorial I am going to be using the optional chords as I play through the song even at the end with my cover but all of those chords will be in parentheses at the end so if you don't want to play them you could always just continue playing whatever chord is written all right so once you've practiced those chords and you have them memorized then let's go ahead and move on to to some strumming patterns that you can use with this song Stay so those of you who are familiar with my other tutorials already know it's coming the very first strumming pattern I wanted to show you is the practice pattern and all you have to do for that one is we just want to go through the whole song and we're going to play each chord once on a down stroke and we're just going to kind of do that so that we know where those chord transitions are to be expected so let me give you an example of what this pattern would sound like with the first verse so you're starting with a minor and it goes guess it's true I'm not good at a one night stand but I still need lovez I'm just a man and like I said when I was showing you guys the chords if you don't want to use those optional chords you can just play A Minor F and C throughout the Entre Tire thing and those will sound fine as well all right so even though Sam Smith's song is on the piano and you really only hear the Rhythm of when he's playing and changing chords there is a couple of things you can do to dress up this song A little bit with your guitar so one of those ways is to actually go to a strumming pattern which I think sounds good with the chorus so here's the strumming pattern that I came up with it's pretty simple it's just down down up so let's go ahead and practice this Rhythm go ahead and put your a minor chord down and we're just going to go down down down up down down down up it's very simple but it kind of fills in some of that space and so what we want to do is we're going to take this pattern down down up and we want to play it once for each chord except for at the end of the choruses where he holds out the chord twice as long so if that doesn't make sense let me show you if you put your a minor chord on we have a minor down down up F down down up C down down up twice won't you stay with me cuz you're all I need pardon the smiles I just realized how slow we're going right now so of course when you do your cover you want to speed it up a little bit to make it less draggy but anyways I wanted to show you guys that you can use this strumming pattern for the chorus as well as the vers so for the verses it's going to be the exact same thing if you put your a minor chord on it's going to be down down up f c twice guess it's true I'm not good at a one night stand but I still need lovez I'm just a man and you would go through the rest of the song similarly and this pattern will work for the entire song if you really wanted it to but just to reiterate what I said earlier I think if you mix up some strumming and picking patterns it will kind of dress up the song a little bit more and give the guitar part a little bit more interest but before we go into our picking pattern I wanted to show you one more little variation of the strumming pattern so this strumming pattern is still the same as the one that I just showed you except I'm adding a little bit to the end here so this is something that just naturally started happening when I was playing and I wanted to share it with you guys if it's too difficult then definitely stick with whatever pattern you want and if you made one up yourself that's awesome do that one but let me just show you how this one would be so with my a minor chord I'm still going to do the same thing down down down up switch to F down down up switch to C down down down up and then here is where I add in the extras down up down down down up and that's just something that I started doing it kind of leads into the next chord so let me play that for you guys again it's a minor f c down up down down down up and then you go back into the next chord so it kind of just leads in nicely to the next cord and another reason I wanted to show this to you guys is because if you want to do some of those optional cords this strumming pattern works really well with those extra chords so sometimes during the courses I like to add in those extra cords and a good place to add those in would be right here at the end of this pattern at the extra down down up at the end so let me show you what I mean if I have a minor down down up F down down up C down up down up down and then I can switch to the next chord g and those are again just to lead into the next little um line of the song and I think it sounds really nice so if you want to add that in there then that's awesome if you don't want to then go ahead and stick with pattern one or any of the patterns that you've come up with yourself so let's go ahead and start in on this picking pattern so I have my a minor chord on which is the first chord in the verse and what I'm going to do is for every chord I'm going to play the lowest note with my thumb so in the case of a minor the lowest note would be our open a string so I'm just going to pick that with my thumb and then for the rest of this pattern these two fingers are always going to stay the same you're going to take your pointer finger and you're going to play the third g string and then you're going to take your middle finger and you're going to play the B string so pointer is G or three and middle finger is b or two so Al together we have our thumb on the fifth our pointer on the third and our middle finger on the second and now the pattern becomes really easy because it's going to stay the same for this whole song so we have 5 3 2 3 and that's pretty much the pattern we've got our lowest note five 3 2 three and so now whenever we add in those chord transitions it's going to be the same so if you put your F chord on which comes after the a minor our lowest note now becomes the sixth string or the low E string so now I'm using my thumb to play that string but these two fingers are still going to stay on the third second so for f we've got 6 3 2 3 and then I'm going to switch to my C chord which comes after the F and again the lowest note in the C chord is our fifth string again so we're going to go back to 5 3 2 3 and I bet you guys get the pattern so let's go ahead and go back to our a minor chord we have 5 3 2 3 switch to your F chord 6 3 2 3 go to your c chord 5 3 2 3 twice back to a minor f c twice won't you stay with me cuz you're all I need this same love it's clear to see darling stay with me now for the verse it's just going to be straight up that pattern but for the chorus what I like to do is I like to dress up the picking pattern a little bit by adding in some extra finger changes so let's go ahead and go to the chorus if you put your a minor chord down we're going to go 5 3 2 3 switch to F 6 3 2 3 go to C 5 3 2 3 but right here I'm going to change it up a little bit and instead of repeating the C chord the same way this time I'm going to take my thumb and play the fifth string and then take my pointer and play the third string and now what I'm doing is I'm changing the cord so I'm going to move my third finger out of the way and then I'm going to take my second finger and move it up one string okay so we had our c chord on and I'm just moving my second finger right behind behind it and then taking my third finger off and now when we do that and we play 53 again so with my C chord I have 53 and then I do the little change and I have 53 so it's kind of creating a little bit of a scale so let me show you what that sounds like Al together we've got a minor f c 53 ch change three a minor F C W you stay with me cuz you're all I need this a love it's clear to see but darling stay with me all right so once you've practiced those cords and the strumming and you decided if you want to do picking and all of that stuff then let's go ahead and put together all of those elements and we'll play through the entire song of Stay With Me by Sam Smith guess it's true I'm not good at a one night stand but I still need love I'm just a man these nights never seem to go to plan I don't want you to leave you hold my hand oh won't you stay with me cuz you're all I need this a love it's clear to see but darling stay with me why am I so emotional no it's not a good look in some selfcontrol and deep down I know this never works you can lay with me so it's doesn't hurt oh won't you stay with me cuz you're all I need this a love it's clear to see but darling stay with me oh won't you stay with me cuz you're all at me this love it's clear to see but darling stay with me won't you stay with me cuz you're all I need this a love it's clear to see darling stay with me all right congratulations you guys just played through Stay With Me by Sam Smith and this concludes my tutorial thank you guys so much for watching and all of your support I always love it when you guys leave comments down below so I love reading them and thank you for sending me those messages and everything like that um if you want to play some more songs then go ahead and check out one of these two playlists and it will take you to some songs that might be a little bit more difficult and then some songs that might be a little bit easier for you so go ahead and pick which playlist you think would suit your needs better and also of course please feel free to follow me on any of my social media sites to get in contact with me like I always say I check Twitter every single day so that's the fastest way to reach me if you have an urgent question and um other ways to reach me are Facebook and Instagram I do get all of you guys' direct messages on those too and and I try to check those as often as I can of course also if you leave a comment down below then hopefully other people out there you guys can all help each other answer everyone else's questions and I just love it to see when we all come together as a guitar community and I just love it please make sure also to thumbs up this video down below if you found it helpful and also subscribe to my channel if you're looking forward to more tutorials just like this one in the future until next time thanks again for watching and I hope to see you guys back here again bye darling stay with me