Take It Easy by The Eagles Tutorial/Lesson
Take It Easy
G, C, Am, D, Em, Am7, Dm7
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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 take it easy by eagles on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something that you like to learn and before we jump into it i just want to give a huge thank you to all of my patrons over on my patreon page for voting for this song as this month's patron picks if you want a little bit of voting power in the tutorials that you see here on my channel make sure to join my patreon page which will be linked down below all right guys so today i'm going to show you a super simple way to play this song but if you are somebody who's wanting to learn those solos and things like that make sure to leave that in a comment below and i can make another video on how to do that um but today i am going to keep this as beginner friendly as possible so with that being said let's jump into the overview make sure your guitar is in standard tuning and for this song we will not need a capo in order to play it in the original key on top of that i'm going to be showing you guys seven chords today and one of them is kind of a partial bar which is our d minor seven but if you're not a bar chord person don't worry about it it's really one of the easiest bar chords you'll ever play so just give it a try and i'm also going to show you two different strumming patterns that you can use for the entire song and that's it so let's go ahead and jump into what those chords look like all right guys so i've gone ahead and zoomed in a little bit to take a closer look at these chords like i said you only need to know seven and the first chord you need to know is g which looks like this and sounds like this next is our c chord which looks like this and sounds like this after that we have our a minor which looks like this and sounds like this next is our d chord which looks like this and sounds like this after that we have our e minor which looks like this and sounds like this then you have your a minor 7 which looks like this and sounds like this and then the last chord you need to know is our d minor 7 which like i said earlier is your kind of partial bar so you can see i'm kind of just partially barring my first finger across these two strings here so it looks like this and sounds like this and those are the seven chords you need to know to play the song all right so go ahead and make sure you take a few moments here to practice transitioning between these chords the song is pretty straightforward but we do want to make sure that we have those transitions under our belt before we move on so if that's something you need help with make sure to check out this video right here where i talk a little bit about tips and tricks on how to transition a little quicker but after that we'll jump into the strumming patterns i want to show you for this song all right guys as always we're going to start our first strumming pattern as our practice pattern which is just one simple down strum on the beat for every chord change this is really gonna help people who are beginners who need a little help with transitioning or maybe you need help with singing and playing at the same time or you're just not familiar with the song this is the place to start so all you want to do is do one down strum for every chord change so let's go ahead and practice this with some chords so i'm going to put a chord transition here on screen as you can see we're going to hold on to g three different times and then go from that to d to c this is the progression for the beginning of verse one so i just want to kind of use this as an example of how we would play this so again just one simple down strum for every chord change one two three and the way that i suggest that you use this is to practice singing with the single down strum especially if you're someone who has trouble with singing and playing at the same time this is really going to get you used to the song and know exactly what word you're singing when you're making those chord transitions so let's do that again with the words on screen one two all right so you kind of just want to go through the whole song like that with the one simple down strum just so you're really familiar with where you're going to be making those chord transitions and then once you have that under your belt we can move on to the strumming pattern that i like to use for this song all right guys so the strumming pattern i suggest with this song is our classic down down up up down up and it's gonna sound a little something like this and the beautiful thing about this pattern is that you can use it for the entire song and it sounds really great so let's go ahead and get those motions down first let's put our g chord on since that's the first chord in the song and we'll just go through these motions really quick we've got down down up down up down down up up down all right so hopefully that feels pretty natural to you once you get those motions down we just got to speed it up to tempo okay so i'll count us off let's try to do this at tempo one two three four down down up up down up down down up up down nice all right guys so once you've kind of internalized that pattern and you can get it at tempo the last thing you need to do is just add in some chord transitions so i'm going to put a few here up on screen and this is going to be the progression that you'll see in the second half of the chorus i wanted to use this as an example just because that's where all of these patterns are going to be the most prevalent so what we're going to do now is we're going to play through this pattern one time through for each of these chords listed okay so let's try this together i'll count us off one two ready go c g down down up don't awesome all right guys so even though this strumming pattern can be used for the majority of the song there are just a few places where the chord transitions are going to move a little bit quicker so for that we do need to use a different strumming pattern which is why i have strumming pattern 2 for you and as you can see it's down down up down up and it's gonna sound a little something like this all right so now that you've heard the rhythm let's go ahead and just do some of the motions to make sure we've got it so again with our g chord on we're just going to play these motions we've got down down up down up and that's the whole thing okay down down up down down up nice so what you want to do now is put it in rhythm so let's go ahead and speed it up a little bit put it at tempo i'll count us off one two three four down down up down down down up down down up down down now when you stick on the same cord for this whole pattern it does kind of sound a little messy and it's hard to understand like where that fits into the song so let's go ahead and explain something i'm going to put a little vertical line here in the middle of this pattern so we've got down down up on the left side down down up on the right side and what this vertical line is going to represent is a chord change so the reason why we want to learn this pattern is because we're going to use this for any time in the song where the chords change a little bit faster than the rest of the song so a good example of that would be in the first verse while i'm running down the road trying to loosen my load i've got seven women on my mind right there we're going to be changing our chords from g to d to c relatively quickly and that's where we would use this pattern okay so let's go ahead and do an example of that so what i want you to do is play your g chord for the left half of the pattern and your d chord for the right half so it's gonna sound like this and if you put that in context with the rest of the verse you'll see how it fits in really nicely so let me put this on screen we're going to go from our g chord and we're going to hold that out for two measures with our strumming pattern one and then we're going to go to this g to d chord progression where we're going to be doing strumming pattern two and then we're going to end on our c chord where we go back to strumming pattern one it'll make a lot more sense when we put it together so let's try that out one two ready go down down up up down up down down up up down down down up all right so hopefully you can hear the song coming together now one two ready go all right so basically this second strumming pattern is just going to be used in the song wherever you're doing quicker chord transitions and if you're familiar with the song it'll kind of be intuitive where those are but i will have that listed through my play through as well so um with that being said that is all of the strumming patterns and chords and everything i wanted to teach you and you are now ready to put the whole song together so let's jump to the playhead one two ready go running down the road do you want to have fun jamming with me to the rest of this song 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 tutorials i'll make sure to put a link in the description down below as well as the icard here in the corner special shout out and thank you to my very top patrons antonio luis mark cynthia joe paul and pamela and thanks to all of my patrons on my patreon page for voting for this song as this month's patron picks that concludes my tutorial for today so i hope that it helped you if it did make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well as subscribe to my channel that way you never miss out on any other new tutorials 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 of things coming up i'll pull you guys on what you want to see next and i'll even do giveaways on there a few times a year so make sure to check that out but anyways thank you so much for watching i hope this helped and i will see you in my next one bye you