The Cure by Olivia Rodrigo Tutorial/Lesson
The Cure
Asus2, Cmaj7, F/C, C, Dm7, Gadd4, Em7
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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 The Cure by Olivia Rodrigo on the guitar. And today I am featuring my Orangewood Brooklyn guitar. So if you like what you see, I will link more information about it 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 you only need to know seven different chord shapes to play through this entire song. And we're start with our A [music] sus 2, which looks like this. and sounds like this. And by the way, if you don't know how to read these chord charts you're seeing on screen, I do cover how to do that my free beginner series right here on YouTube. So, make sure to check that out right here. The next chord shape is our C major 7. We also [music] have our F over C. Next is our C major. Then we have our D minor 7. However, I did mark this as a no bar chord tutorial. And technically, since we're barring these bottom two strings, D minor 7 is a bar chord. So, if you don't want to do bar chords, you can just replace this with a regular D minor chord. >> [music] >> All right. So, go ahead and choose which D minor you like. Um, our next chord shape is our G add 4. And then the last chord shape is our E minor 7. And something to note about these chords is the reason I chose these shapes in particular is because it is going to allow for the easiest chord transitions because we are going to be in our first position for all of these chords, which means you don't have to move your hand up and down the neck. So if you'll notice your A sus 2, [music] an easy switch to your C major 7 is just to take your ring finger off and move it up a string and a fret. [music] All right? And then again your C major 7 to your F over C. You just put your pinky down underneath and add your first finger and move your middle finger down. So, relatively [music] easy transition there. And then from your F over C to your C, just take off your pinky and move your ring finger, your middle finger back up. All right. And that's going to be [music] most of the chords that you'll see in this song. So, just keep that in mind. There are other ways to play some of these chord shapes, but I chose [music] these particularly because they're going to be easy to transition between. So, go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really look over these chord shapes, get them memorized, and also practice transitioning back and forth between them because it'll make learning the rest of the song so much easier for you. And once you have these chords under your belt, we can go ahead and talk about the strumming [music] that I would suggest for this song. So, as I always say, if you are brand new to playing guitar, or you're somebody who wants to play guitar [music] while singing at the same time and you're currently struggling with that, the first thing I would suggest doing is to bring up the song and go ahead and go through the entire thing with just a single downstrum on each chord change as you sing through the song. And you want to take this time to really get used to what word or what syllable you're on whenever those chords are changing. So, here's a quick example of what that would look like with the chorus. My head is full of [music and singing] poison and my heart is full of doubt. I got toxins [singing and music] in my bloodstream. You tried hard to suck them out. All right, so that's just a really quick example, but you would essentially want to do that for the entire song and just really make sure you know where those chords are going to be changing. And this is actually something you do right now. If you check out my Patreon page, I do have this entire guide available to download and print out. So, I'll make sure to leave that link in the description box if you're interested. But once you've done this and you're comfortable with where those chord transitions are going to be taking place, we can go ahead and add to this to create more of a full strumming pattern that you can use for this song. All right, guys. So, you actually have two different strumming options to show you today, but I'm going to start out with the one that I think fits the song better and you can use through the whole thing. And as you can see here at the top of the screen, we're going to be counting this in an eighth note count. And it's just going to be all downstrum. So, it's going to sound like this. We have one and two and three and four and down down down down down [singing and music] down down. All right, super simple. And what we're going to do is play this pattern two times per chord for almost the entire song. There are going to be a few measures here where we're only going to play it for one measure, but I'll cover all of that here in a second. So, let's go ahead and take a look right here at the beginning of the song in the intro. As you can see, we're starting with our asus 2 chord on. And what you're gonna do is play this entire pattern through two times on a sus 2. So we've got 1 and [singing] two and three and four [music] and and then again 1 and 2 and 3 and [singing] four and. Then you switch to your [music] next chord C major 7. Same thing. 1 and 2 and 3 [singing and music] and 4 and. And we're doing it twice. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 [music] and. All right. So, something you might already be noticing is when we're doing these all downstrum patterns, it can start to sound a little bit muddy if you're not keeping careful track of where you are in the count. So, something I like to do to kind of help with that rhythm is I will add some accents. So, I'm going to go ahead and denote some of these down arrows as our accented beats. And basically, what you want to do for that is we're going to strum those beats with a little bit extra emphasis with our strumming hand, like kind of like more of a flick of the wrist. And then for the non-acented strums, you want to kind of keep it as a smaller motion. So something to think about is for the accented strums, you want to strum all the strings with a little bit of extra emphasis, but then for the non-acented strums, you kind of want to concentrate more just on kind of the middle strings and have a smaller motion. [music] All right. So when we add those accents in there, you can see we're accenting the first beat, the end of the two, and beat four. So, it's going to sound like this. We've got 1 and [music] 2 and 3 and 4 and All right. So, hopefully you can hear the difference between those accented strums and the non-acented ones. [music] Those accents are going to play a really important part in this song. This is really going to be a great way to kind of add some rhythm back in there and kind of create a little bit more of a percussive line within the guitar part. And then a second thing I wanted to show you guys technique-wise is we also want to apply a palm mute for different parts of the song to kind of differentiate the verses from the choruses and things like that. So whenever I'm doing a palm mute, all I'm doing is I'm taking the side of my hand that has my pick in it. This kind of fleshier side of your palm, you want to gently lay that on your guitar strings really close to where the bridge of your guitar is right here. So the further back you go with your hand, the more you'll be able to hear the notes that you're strumming. But you'll see here also that it's being a little bit more muted or dampened. [music] All right. So, here's a regular ringing strum, and here's a palm muted strum. So, you can still hear the chord, but it's just going to be a little bit more dampened. So, what we want to do is we want to apply this palm mute to our all downstrum pattern. So, with that intro in mind, again, we're starting with our AUS 2. We're going to add those accents in while doing a palm mute. So, it's going to go 1 and 2 [music] and 3 and 4 and. And something to note here is whenever I'm about to accent a strum, you'll see my hand lifts off of the strings and then as I strum, my side of my palm is going to hit the strings with that strum almost in the same motion. All right? And that's what's going to allow us to have that accented palm muted sound. On the non-acented, you can see my palm will kind of maintain contact with the strings. All right. So, we've got lift for the accent. 1 and two lift and three and lift. [music] Four and. Okay. So, we're going really slow, but once you start to slowly speed this up, you'll see how these two techniques can combine to create a really cool percussive sound. So, we've got 1 and 2 and [music] 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and. All right. Then we've got our C major 7. Same thing. 1 and 2 and [singing and music] 3 and four and. One and two and three and four and. All right. And this strumming pattern once you can get those techniques of the accents and the palm mutes down, you can actually use it for the entire song. So, let me go ahead and show you what this sounds like with all those techniques applied. And I'm also going to speed it up a little bit to keep it more at full tempo. So, we've got 1 2 ready go. A two measures. C two measures [music] A. All right. Accents, palm mutes going. All right. All the pretty girls in the foreground of my mind. [music] I thought I'd done enough, but they keep moving the line. [music] All right. So, you can hear how we can use this strum pattern to play through the verses. Um, when we get to the second half of the verse, that's when we're going to have a different chord. So, now we're going to go from our F over C to our C chord, but the strum pattern is exactly the same. So, we've got F [music] two measures to C. All right. I thought I found [singing] the time. All right. Now, we go into verse two, and that's going to be exactly played the same way as verse one. Now, when we get into the chorus, this is where I like to kind of change up my strum pattern. Now, as I said earlier, if you want to keep this all downstrum pattern going for the whole song, I do actually think it sounds more accurate to the original song. However, if you've tried in any capacity to play this at tempo with all downstrum the whole time, it does get extremely tiring. Um, so what I like to do is when I get to the choruses where it rings out a little bit more, I actually like to switch to a second strumming pattern. So, let's go ahead and talk about strumming pattern two next. All right, guys. So, for this second strumming pattern, it might look a little bit more complicated just because it's a little bit longer. But what I've done here is at the top of the screen, you're actually going to be seeing two different measures. So, earlier when I was showing you the all downstrum pattern, that was just one measure and we repeated it twice for the chords. But for the chorus, what I like to do is I will combine two measures into one strumming pattern. Okay? So again, we're counting this still in an eighth note count. And it's going to sound like this. We have one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and. So see how I counted out two measures there, but we're playing something different for each measure. So for the first measure, we're going down, up, up, down, up. And then for the second measure, we're going rest up down up. So when you combine both of those together, that creates the second strumming pattern that I would recommend using for the choruses of this song. So you can see here on the chorus, we're starting with our D minor 7 chord. What I would recommend doing is you're going to play through this entire pattern. So both measures one time for each chord. So on D minor 7, we've got down up down up down up. Then switch right into your next chord. F over C. Same thing. down, [music and singing] down, up, up, down, up, up, down, up, down, [music] up. Then we've got C. [singing] Down, down, up, up, down, up, up, down, up. Then our G add [music] four. Down, down, up, up, down, up, up, down, up. All right. So, in a lot of ways, even though this second strumming pattern looks a little bit longer on the surface, I do think it's actually easier to play because we don't have to add any accents or palm muting or any other little techniques in here because the rhythm itself is already very distinctual. And I like to use that again for any parts of the song that are a little bit louder and ring out, such as the chorus. So, let me go ahead and speed that up a little so you can hear how it all comes together. And then we'll add some singing as well. So, we're starting on our D minor 7. You've got down, down, up, up, down, up, up, down, up, F over C. All right, we're doing both of these in measures for each of these chords. And this is how [music and singing] I like to use it for the chorus. But my head is full of poin and my [singing] heart is full of doubt. [music] I got to in my bloodream. You tried [singing and music] hard to suck a mouth. [music] All right. So, I'm realizing we are going slightly below tempo still. So, we do want to speed this up to get it more at tempo. But again, this second strumming pattern is totally optional. I just like to kind of vary it up so as to keep the guitar part a little bit more interesting and also to give my strumming hand a little bit of rest in between all of those downstrum patterns because that can kind of take it out of you energy-wise. And then really quick, I wanted to talk about just a few things that you might see if you are looking at the guide that's on my Patreon page. First of all, you'll see that I have this little X2 by most of the chords on my guide. That's because we are playing these chords for two measures. So, just keep in mind that if you are going to incorporate that second pattern that we just went over, it is already going to span the two measures that you need for the choruses. So, basically, rule of thumb is if you're playing the first all downstrum pattern, you will repeat that pattern twice per chord. But if you're going to play the second longer pattern, even though it says X2, it's kind of encompassed in that strumming pattern already. So, you only need to play the entire two measure strumming pattern one time per chord. If that doesn't make sense, make sure to check out the guide that's on my Patreon page that explains it a little better. The first page, which explains all of this rhythm stuff, is totally free. You can download it right now by joining as a free member. So, make sure to check that out. Um, another thing that you might see in the guide is at the very end with the outros. You'll see here we've got a lot of starred chords. If you're not familiar with my tutorials, whenever I do a little starred chord, that's just my way of suggesting to you guys that we're going to do a single downstrum. So, for the entire outro, we're just doing [music] single downstrums. All right. [music] And then another thing I like to do here if you wanted to is instead of doing a full downstroum, I will pick each string individually. So for D minor 7, I go, all right, those [music] bottom four strings. And I'll do that twice because we have two measures. [music] For F over C, I like to do the four middle strings. For C, again, the four middle strings. And then for the E minor 7, and we do the four middle strings [music] as well. All right. So, that's just a totally quick option that you can do for the outro. So, you can either stick with single downstrums or like I like to do, pick [music] each string. Okay. Um, and then one last thing I wanted to suggest is if you do want to do that all downstrum pattern for this song, if you want to to make it sound more accurate, you can add that little extra upstrum at the very end of the strumming pattern right before you change chords every time. And then also in the intro they kind of do a quick down up strumming right before beat one to kind of lead in. All right. So it's really fast. So if you want to do that to kind of intro the song you would go. [music] So that kind of takes a little bit more practice because you are applying that palm mute immediately out of the gate. Um but anyways that concludes the strumming portion of this tutorial. All right guys. So again, go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really look over these strumming rhythms and kind of build up that muscle memory, especially that all downstrum pattern. Even though it's simple to do, it can take a lot of practice, especially at the original tempo because this song moves so quickly. So if you need a little bit of extra help with either of these strumming rhythms, you can check out my practice with me strumming patterns playlist I have right here on YouTube where I go over these and we slowly build [music] up that speed together. But once you have these strumming rhythms under your belt, we can go ahead and put everything together to play through the song. One, two, three, four. One, two. All the [singing] pretty girls in the mind. I thought I'd done enough, but they keep [singing] moving the line. Want to have fun jamming out to the rest of this song with me? >> Then make sure to check out my Patreon page where you can unlock access to this and hundreds of my other playalong guitar tutorials. I'll make sure to leave a link for it in the description box down below. If you enjoyed learning this song with me, then you should definitely check out this video. Not only does it have a super [music] similar vibe and feel, but it's just as fun and easy to play. So, I'll see you over there. Bye.