What's Up by 4 Non Blondes Tutorial/Lesson
What's Up
A, Bm, 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 What's Up by for Non Blondes on the guitar huge shout out and thank you goes to Lava music for sponsoring today's video I will be featuring their Brand New lav Me play guitar in this tutorial today so make sure to stay tuned for a little bit more about that later um 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 three chord shapes to play through this entire song and we're going to start with our a major 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 in my free beginner course right here on YouTube so make sure to check that out the next chord is our B minor bar chord and then the last chord you need to know is our D chord and those are the only three chord shapes to play through the song so go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really memorize those chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them one of the awesome things about this song is that the chord order is the same throughout the entire song so it makes for easy Transitions and speaking of which that's the first thing I wanted to talk to you guys about the lava me play guitar one of their smart features includes the practice app where you can choose the chord shapes you're currently working on and it'll help you practice transitioning between them faster seriously I was impressed with just how many cord shapes they had available to choose from Beyond just your basic open chords and once you select the chords you want to work on and put them in the order of the song you're trying to learn you just start playing and the lava me play will listen to your shapes and let you know when you're nailing the transitions it can even generate a rapport at the end of your practice session to let you know how you're doing over time which is so cool but if you haven't gotten your hands on this guitar yet you can also check out out my practice with me Series right here on YouTube where we go through the skill in real time together um but once you have all of that under your belt we can go ahead and talk about these strumming for this song So if you are a beginner or somebody who struggles with playing and singing at the same time the first thing I would suggest you do is bring up the song and play through the whole song with a single down strum on every chord change as you sing through the song and you would use this time to really just get used to where those chord transitions are going to happen so here's a quick example of what that would look like 25 years and my life is still trying to get up that great big hill of Hope for a destination all right so basically you would want to do that exact same thing for the entire song and just make sure you know where those chord transitions are going to happen and this is actually something you can 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 for you guys um but once you've done that we can talk about the full strumming pattern that you can use for this song all right guys so for the full strumming pattern as you can see it's down down up down up down up up down up and I know it sounds like a lot it looks like a lot but no worries we're going to break this down right now so let's go ahead and zoom in and talk a little bit more about this Rhythm all right guys so we are going to be in a 16th note rhythm today so let's go ahead and just kind of break down how that sounds we have one E and A two E and A 3 E and A 4 e and a one e and a two e and a three e and a four E and A one E and A two e and a three e and a four E and A down down up down up down up up down up down down up down down up down up down up up down up all right so we are going pretty fast if you need to go ahead and pause the video and just take some time to really understand how to count this Rhythm and if you don't know what 16th rhythms are or how to count them I Do cover that in my beginner series as well so make sure to check that video out right here but once you understand the Rhythm the battle is halfway tackled because you can use this strumming pattern for the entire song and it sounds really great so basically what you want to do is you're going to play this entire pattern through one time per chord throughout the song So basically the entire song goes from A to B minor to D back to a so that's kind of like one little round okay and you want to apply this pattern to each chord in that round so on a we have down down up down up down up up down up to B minor down down up down down up down up up down up to D down down up down up down up up down up back to a down down up down down up down up up down up all right so if you have a keen ear you might have noticed it's a little bit bouncy sounding so instead of like down down up down down up down up down up up down up I'm kind of giving it a little bit more of a free kind of flow down up down down up down up down up up down up it's a really minute kind of like difference but if you can hear it I would definitely suggest going with the more like kind of bouncy route because it does sound a lot more like the original that way and then um I'm also going to go ahead right now and underline some of these down and up strums and basically what this is going to represent are kind of stressed beats or beats that we're going to Accent a little bit because this strumming pattern has a lot going on it can be really easy to kind of get it sounding muddy so by accenting these beats we can kind of Drive the Rhythm forward so we have down down up down down up down up up down up down down up down up down up up down all right and obviously all of the accents and everything is totally optional but if you can hear it and put it in I do think it adds a lot to the strumming so let's go ahead and put the entire round together on our a chord we have down up down down up down up down up up down up to be minor down down up down up down up up down up to D down down up down down up down up down up up down up to a down down up down up down up up down up 25 years in my love life is still trying to get up that great big hill of Hope for a destination all right and so one last thing I wanted to add in here again this is totally optional but I think it sounds really cool and really adds a lot is um on our a chord if you take off your ring finger you can hear in the original song she does this occasionally on the last up down up in this strumming pattern so basically what I'm saying is on our a chord we would do down down up down down up down up down up then take off your ring finger and finish it out up down up all right if you listen carefully you can hear that in the original and on the D it's one of the cool things you can do with this chord is you can actually add your pinky here make it a d suspended or you could also take off your middle finger okay and you can hear the little differences that makes here's your regular D all right little Minor Details like that but you can hear she uses this especially at the end there so what I would do with your D chord is I would hold your regular D chord down for down up down down up and then here on the third beat go ahead and add your pinky down up and then take off your pinky back to your D chord down and then on this upstrom go ahead and take off your middle finger and then put it back on for the last three beats all right like I said totally optional but I think it sounds really cool if you add these little Frills in there so with the frill the whole time through the round would sound like this A to B minor to D to a 25 years and my life is still trying to get up that great big hill of home or a destination all right and you might have noticed there I don't know if I did this or not but if you ever add any extra down or up strums within a pattern that I suggest in one of my videos that's totally okay I would actually encourage you to do that whatever strumming Rhythm your body is naturally feeling will be the easiest one for you to eventually sing on top of so if you find the string pattern that I have lifted on screen a little bit difficult and you find yourself adding extra down or up strums I'm here to tell you that's totally okay go with what your body is telling you as long as you are keeping maintaining a good Rhythm it should be no problem okay so um that is actually the strumming pattern that you can use for the entire song this song is super repetitive with the guitar part so once you get the strumming pattern pattern with those chord transitions down for one round you just repeat that over and over again until the end of the song so again go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really understand how to count this strumming Rhythm as well as get it internalized so all of those accents and the little Frills and things like that if you want to add them in there they all come naturally and then once you can speed up this strumming Rhythm and get it kind of under your belt without actively counting the Rhythm in your head the easier it'll be to add singing on top of it so make sure you take the time to really practice this strumming Rhythm before you try to sing on top of it um but once you have that down we can put everything we learned together in this tutorial to play through the song and this is actually another thing I wanted to highlight about the lava me play if you've ever seen my beginner series you'll know how important I think it is to practice with a metronome to develop good Rhythm and strumming habits but something else that works just as well but can be a little bit more fun is playing to a drum track and with lava me plays live drums app you can actually choose all sorts of music genres and jam with a beat each track is again built into the guitar using the hi lava system and the coolest part is you can actually set what tempo you want to play and the drum track will adjust to match so I've seriously had the most fun learning new songs to teach you guys by setting it to a beat so now let's go ahead and get into this play along where you can see it in action 25 days of my life still trying to get up that big hill of for the want to 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 FasTrack and playong guitar tutorials I'll make sure to leave a link 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 similar but it's just as fun and easy to play so I'll see you over there bye