You Are My Sunshine by N/A Tutorial/Lesson
You Are My Sunshine
G, C, D
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Video transcript
looking for a simple song to learn so you can serenade your special someone well then you've clicked on the perfect video because today I'm going to show you a super beginner friendly way to Play You Are My Sunshine on the guitar so let's get started so to play this song you only need to know three different chords and the first one is G next is C and the last one is d now optionally you can also learn an E minor chord foreign and I'll show you a cool way you can use that but this is totally optional the three chords you need to know to play are g c and d now for strumming the simplest thing you can do is play a single down strum for every chord change as you sing through the song so let's go ahead and put that on screen and I'll show you how that would go you are my sunshine my only sunshine make me happy when skies are gray you'll never know dear how much I love you please don't take my sunshine away and there you have it the simplest way to play this is just with that single down strum but if you want to have something that's a little bit more Jammy a little bit more fun to sing along to you can use this pattern right here so this is our strumming pattern that I would suggest for this song it's down up up down up and here's what that Rhythm sounds like all right so basically you want to take this pattern and repeat it twice for that first G chord and then one time for all the other chords after that so let me go ahead and put the words back on screen we're starting on our G you're just gonna go down down up up down up that's the whole pattern you want to do that twice for G down up up down up again then one time for C down down up up down up back to G back to C back to G and then here on the last G to D chord it's a little bit faster so we're just gonna do half of this pattern so you're going down down up then you're going to repeat that first half of the pattern again on your D down down up and then end on the full pattern on that G chord down down up up down up all right so without stopping it would sound like this G quiet c g c again G down up D down up G you got it Mama foreign awesome now playing this song through with the strumming pattern is a great way to sing it with somebody maybe if you have kids or something and you want to sing it together that's always really fun however if you wanted to use this more to like serenade somebody I would suggest trying to learn a finger picking version and I did figure out a pretty simple one that I have broken down for you so let's go ahead and zoom in so I can show you how to play it alright guys so before we begin this picking pattern I just want to let you know that I usually number my strings so this low E here is our sixth string and it goes five four three two one all the way to your high E string which is one and then the other thing I want to tell you is about your right hand for picking what you want to do is take your pointer your middle and your ring finger and put those on the bottom three strings so your pointers on G your Middle's on B and your ring fingers on the high e then your thumb is going to cover bass notes based on whichever chord we're playing so for instance in our G chord the lowest note is our sixth E string so let me go ahead and teach you this pattern it's going to be the same for all three of our chords so for our G chord you're going to take your thumb on your low E string then your pointer finger then your middle finger then back to your pointer finger then your ring finger on that high e then back to your pointer middle pointer all right so you can kind of see how we're going back to that third string over and over again so it's kind of like a pattern we've got six three two three one three two three and I promise you this is a lot easier if you assign your fingers to a string so don't move your pointer middle and ring from these bottom three strings here your thumb's the only thing that should be moving strings okay so thumb pointer middle pointer ring pointer middle pointer all right once you get used to that the C chord is the same way except your thumb is going to go from your low E string to your a string because that's the lowest string that we play when our we play our c chord all right but the pattern's the same so you're still going to go thumb pointer middle pointer ring pointer middle pointer foreign and with just those two chords alone you can already play most of this so let's go ahead and put the words back on screen you would play through your G twice then on C we're going to go one time back to G back to C back G then here on this last line just like we did with our strumming that g to D chord is going to go a little bit faster so all you want to do is on the G chord we're going to pick thumb pointer middle ring so you're going just down the guitar like that six three two one right and then you go to your D chord now your thumb is going to move to this fourth D string because that's the lowest string that we play in our D chord and then you're going to just go down the guitar again so four three two one all right thumb pointer middle ring and then you would end on your G and the full picking pattern six three two three one three two three all right so the whole thing with picking would sound like this foreign you'll never know dear how much I love you so please don't take my sunshine away and then if you want to end it there you could just do a little strum down that sounds really good but now to give you a few pieces of advice alright guys so my first piece of advice is if you are serenading this to someone and this chord these chords don't seem to really match your vocals an easy thing you can do is grab a capo and try putting it on different Frets and see what matches your vocal range so for example I'm going to go ahead and put my Capo on the second fret that's going to lift the key that you're singing in but you can still play this exactly the same with our g c and d all right and so what you want to do now is practice singing through it and see if this fits your vocal range a little better how much I love you so please don't take my sunshine away all right so that fits my vocal voice a little bit better but go ahead and experiment put it on different Frets and see what you have the easiest time singing in and go with that before you serenade someone with this all right and my second piece of advice has to do with that E minor chord what I showed you at the beginning like I said it's totally optional you can play through this whole thing with just g c and d however if you want to add that E minor chord it does give it a little bit of a different feel to the song so let me just go ahead and show you what I mean if I pull up the words here again on the line how much I love you we usually play a g there above the word love but if you replace that with an E minor I actually think it sounds pretty good kind of ties it together a little bit it makes it sound a little more emotional and a little less like happy so let me just show you what that sounds like so if you think that that E minor sounds better than the G chord that's something that you can kind of play around with and replace if you want to I personally think it just kind of rounds out the song a little bit better but that's totally preferential and up to you and how much experience you have with guitar now if you do want to add that into the picking there is something cool you can do to kind of finish out this song If you are singing it like a lullaby or just serenading it to someone it would sound really cool so let me show you that please don't take my sunshine away on your G here you want to go through the whole picking pattern then come back do your E minor chord we're just going straight down the guitar so six three two one then go to your D four three two one and then end on G foreign and I like to pick it and end it like that so I go six three two three one so if you tack that onto the end of your little cover it'll sound really cute really pretty and just perfect for serenading someone so let me show you with the picking plus that little add-on at the end you'll never know dear how much I love you so please don't take my sunshine away ending foreign or you could also end it with your E minor d and then a single down strap I think both of those ways are really cute and simple and beautiful way to end this song so um that's how you play You Are My Sunshine if you want all of this written down I do have a guide for how I taught this song Today free on my patreon page so I will make sure to link that in the description box below as well as in this I card that'll pop up right here for you guys but I hope that this helped thank you so much for watching make sure to check out the rest of my channel if you are looking for more guitar tutorials and I will see you in my next video coming out really soon bye thank you