Zombie by The Cranberries Tutorial/Lesson
Zombie
Em, Cmaj7, G, D, F#
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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 zombie by the cranberries on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something that you'd like to learn and before we get started i just wanted to give a shout out to all of my patrons over on my patreon page for voting for this song as this month's patron pick if you want some voting power on the tutorials you see here on my channel make sure to check out my patreon page which will be linked down below alright guys so first thing is first i am going to be showing you this on an electric guitar today and i will be using a few different amp settings which i will link in the description box below however you could play through this song with an acoustic guitar and it would be exactly the same with that being said let's go ahead and jump into an overview of what to expect in this tutorial so today's tune is going to be super beginner friendly first of all make sure your guitar is in standard tuning and we do not need a capo to play the song in the original key on top of that i'm going to show you four different chord shapes and none of them are bar chords so it's really great for beginners and i have two strumming patterns to show you although one of them is kind of optional so you can kind of play that if you want to or you don't have to but with all of that being said let's go ahead and jump into what those chords look like all right guys so i've zoomed in a little bit so we can take a closer look at these chords like i said there are only four chord shapes to play with the entire song and we're gonna start with our e minor which looks like this and sounds like this and by the way if you don't know how to read these chord charts that you're seeing on screen i do cover that in my beginner series episode 3 and i will link that right here if you need that for you guys um but after that our next chord is our c major 7 which looks like this and sounds like this next is our g chord which looks like this and sounds like this and then the last chord you need to know is your d over f sharp which looks like this and sounds like this and i am aware that there are different ways you can fret or finger these different chord shapes however i would suggest doing in the way that i have them in my charts right now because it'll really help with the transitioning process all right so if you are a beginner i would go ahead and suggest pausing the video right now and just taking a few minutes to memorize these chord shapes as well as practice transitioning between them luckily this song is pretty repetitive so it is going to follow this transition order for the entire song so as long as you can kind of smoothly get your fingerings from one to the other then it should be no problem for you to move into the strumming so speaking of which let's go ahead and look at our strumming patterns all right so if you are familiar with any of my other tutorials i would suggest that beginners start out with a single down strum on the beat for every chord change i refer to this as my practice pattern because it's really good for people who just need to get used to playing the guitar and who maybe have trouble with singing and playing at the same time so all you want to do is with this chord progression you just want to strum down one time on each chord so we've got e minor c major 7 g and then d over f sharp and the best thing to do with this practice pattern is to go through the entire song and just sing through it and make sure that you've got where you know what chord you're going to be changing on what word you're singing at the same time things like that i do have a guide available on my patreon page which can help you with this process but let's go ahead and just go through the first part of the verse so you get an idea of how this sounds so you're just going to strum down once on your e minor 2 3 4 major 7 3 4 2 right so basically you just want to do that for the entire song make sure you're really familiar with where those chord transitions happen and then once you get used to that we can move on to strumming pattern one all right guys so strumming pattern one as you can see is just going to be down down down down up and it's going to sound a little something like this all right so now that you heard the rhythm let's go ahead and practice that a little bit together so let's put our e minor chords down i'm going to count us in and i just want you to jump in whenever you feel comfortable one two ready go down all right nice so basically what we're gonna do is if you need a little bit more time by the way go ahead and pause the video practice that rhythm on your own for a little bit just to make sure you kind of get that that rhythm that driving force for it once you kind of internalize that what we can do next is add in our chord transitions so like i said at the beginning it's going to follow the exact same progression all the way through so let me just put that on screen and what i want you to do is play through this pattern one time through for each of these chords so on our e minor we've got down down down down down down up then you switch to your c major seven same thing down down down down down down down up then your g down down down down down down down up then your d over f sharp down if you can transition through those pretty smoothly it should sound like this is all right so hopefully you can hear the song start to come together um if you are a beginner this is all you really need to know to play through the whole song like you could play the whole song with this pattern and this chord progression right now however i did want to kind of show you a few more slightly more advanced things that you can do to make it sound a little bit cooler the first of which is accenting certain beads so when you look at this strumming pattern i'm going to go ahead and add an underline for some of these down strums and what i want you to do there is just strum with a little bit extra force and that's going to really drive this rhythm and have a little bit more of that like emphasis so instead of going down down down down down up you want to really like give a little bit of an emphasis on the first the fourth and the seventh down strums so it'll be like down down down down down down down down all right once you put that into the song you'll see it kind of like has a its own little like beat whenever you're kind of like singing through it and you're covered sounds really cool so if you can i would recommend putting that in there and the second thing i wanted to show you to kind of dress it up a little bit also is to add a palm mute so remember this can all be applied to acoustic guitar as well but for my electric all i'm doing is taking the side of my right hand here and just gently laying that across my strings so that when i strum you can kind of hear it's a little bit more muted a little bit more dampened so here's it without it you can hear the ringing here's the palm muted version all right so if you can put in the palm muting with the accented notes it'll really sound a lot cooler and a lot more like the original song so let me just show you that on our e minor chord we've got down down down down down all right so if you can manage to do those two things i would recommend adding them in um if you put that back together with the chord progression the whole thing would sound like this we'll go ahead and go through the first part of the first verse so we've got e minor c major 7 g d over f sharp all right and on acoustic and on electric i would recommend trying to put in that palm mute for the verses whenever they're singing but then when you get to the chorus it's a lot louder so there feel free to take the palm you out you want to leave the accents in and so you're just going to have more of that ringing sound it's going to make everything sound a lot louder a lot more you know in your face for the chorus all right so again all of these are suggestions if all you can handle is just the strumming pattern by itself like i said you can apply that for the entire song however there is a second strumming pattern which rhythmically can be a little bit more difficult a little bit more challenging but i do want to show it to you because you can hear it very clearly in the intro and you could also use it for some of the guitar breaks and stuff in there so let's go ahead and jump into strumming pattern two alright guys so for strumming pattern two as you can see it's down down down up up down up down up and the rhythm is gonna sound like this now as i said this one can be a little bit more tricky especially if you're a beginner so no pressure to learn this however i do think that it sounds really accurate with the intro to this song so i've gone ahead and changed a few of my amp settings to sound a little bit more like the intro but basically let's just put our e minor chords down and we're going to play through this a little bit more slowly just so you can get the you know the motions down so it goes down down up up down pause up down up all right so you can see between the second and third grouping that down strum is going to be kind of held out a little longer so again that's down down down down up up down hold up down up all right that last up down up grouping is almost kind of like leading into the next chord so when we put our chord transitions in you'll see how that happens so um let's speed it up a little bit and play it through a few times like i said whenever you feel comfortable jump in with me and we'll play through this so we're just staying on our e minor chord one two ready go down down down down up down up down all right so again i've realized that this strumming pattern can be really difficult if you're someone who's kind of just getting used to the up and down strums and you're a beginner so again feel free to play through the entire song with strumming pattern one this is just for those of you who want that extra little challenge to play the intro pattern so that is the whole thing so let's go ahead and put our chord transitions back in here and again what i want you to do is play through this entire pattern one time through for each chord so on our e minor we've got down down down up back down up down up then you go to your c major seven down down down down up up down up and you would just play this through two times for the intro of the song so it'd sound like this one two ready go so and then after you play strumming pattern two twice through the chord progression then you could go ahead and move back into strumming pattern one and then it would basically stay with strumming pattern one throughout the rest of the song but like i said if you like strumming pattern two and you like how much it kind of fills up the space you could also do it during like the guitar solo and things like that however if you're a beginner just stick with strumming pattern one the whole thing will sound really good all right guys but now that we've gone over the chord shapes and the strumming patterns that you can use let's go ahead and put all that together to play through the song ready go so 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 as well as all my other fast track and play-along tutorials i'll make sure to leave a link in the description box below as well as in this icard right up here all right guys but that ends my tutorial today if this video helped you 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 a special shout out goes out to all of my top patrons over on my patreon page i will have all of their names listed on screen right now as well as a huge thank you to all of my patrons for making videos just like this one possible 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 learn next and i'll even do giveaways on there a few times a year so make sure to check it out but that ends my tutorial so thank you so much for watching i really hope it helped and i will see you in my next one bye you