Viva La Vida by Coldplay Tutorial/Lesson
Viva La Vida
C, D, G, Em, Bm
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Video transcript
foreign and today let's learn how to play Viva La Vida by Coldplay 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 alright guys so we only have five chords to play through this whole song and we're gonna start with our c chord 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 make sure to check out my free beginner course right here the next chord you need to know is your D major after that we have our G major chord then we have our E minor chord and the last chord you need to know is our B minor chord and those are the only five chords you need to know to play this song So if you're a beginner go ahead and pause the video and just take a few minutes to memorize these chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them it will make learning the rest of the song so much easier and as a quick side note if you are someone who is struggling with bar chords that B minor bar chord you could replace with a G chord for the entire song I think it sounds pretty good that way still so if you want to avoid the bar chord altogether go ahead and replace the B minor with the G but with that being said let's go ahead and talk a little bit about strumming now the first thing I'd recommend doing is going through the entire song and singing through it and just doing a single Downstream for each chord change this is going to help you kind of get used to where the singing and the strumming come together so as a quick example here would be verse one I used to rule the world Seas would rise when I gave the world all right and you would basically just want to do that for the entire song and get used to what syllable you are changing chords on if you'd like to download a printable guide with everything that I'm teaching in this tutorial make sure to check out my patreon page um but once you've done that we can go ahead and talk about the full strumming pattern alright guys so as you can see the full strumming pattern does look a little bit long so let's go ahead and zoom in and talk about the Rhythm alright guys so the full strumming pattern for this song is going to be counted with a 16th note Rhythm so if you're unfamiliar with what that means or how to do that go ahead and check out my beginner course where I Do cover that in more detail but let's go ahead and go over this Rhythm we're gonna have one E and A two e and a three e and a four e and a one and two and a e a four and a down down down up up up down down all right so even though this pattern does look kind of long and might be hard to remember what we're going to do is actually change chords in the middle of it so I'm going to put a vertical line here and that's where we're going to change chords so on your first chord you're going to do down down and then switch chords to your next one up up up down down up so it makes it a little bit easier to remember um the full pattern so we're gonna have down down down down up up up down down up one and two and a e a four and a c d g e minor and you can apply this for the whole song and then it would work just fine please all right and this would work for the courses as well thank you right so like I said earlier this full strumming pattern can be applied for the entire song and it sounds really good one quick note is that if you do find yourself adding in extra down strums or up strums or you find it hard to play the full Rhythm while playing through the whole song always feel free to adjust the strumming pattern to however you want to play it if you find yourself adding in extra strums every now and then totally fine I actually find myself doing this a lot during the choruses as well and you'll see that in the playthrough so just keep that in mind these are always suggestions and feel free to tweak them as however you see fit but go ahead and pause and just make sure to take the time to memorize and internalize this strumming pattern it'll really make playing through the song a lot easier and then once you've done that we can go through the song one two three four years alone save the streets that I used Wanna Have Fun jamming out to 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 icard right up here if you enjoyed learning this song with me then you should definitely check out this video next it's really similar and super fun and just as easy to play so I'll see you over there