Throughout this songwriting part of the course,
there's gonna be some stuff that's
gonna be geared towards absolute beginners,
intermediate players, and advanced players.
This part is for the absolute beginners.
Like you don't know that what the world can
be with you as a guitar player.
And I'm here to show you that right
now-- within a matter of minutes,
that you can be a songwriter.
So we'll start like this.
So if you're holding a guitar in your hands
and you can play a couple of notes on the guitar,
you're well on your way to being a songwriter.
You don't have to even know the names of the strings.
For the moment, let's just call it
the fattest string, the one closest to you.
It happens to be the E string.
But play that string.
[GUITAR NOTE]
Great job.
OK.
[LAUGHING] And then pick any of the--
pick a dot.
The first, second, or third.
Let's take the first dot, just for the sake of argument.
And so all you're gonna do is play
those two notes, one at a time.
[GUITAR NOTE]
And now the dot.
[GUITAR NOTE]
OK.
Practice that until you're able to play both of those.
Now just pick a number between one and four.
Let's just say four is the number that you chose.
Play that fat open string four times in a row.
[STRUMMING GUITAR]
Pretty good.
Try it again.
[STRUMMING GUITAR]
Sounds like the fat open note four times in a row.
Now, that second note, which is this dot here, how about
let's pick another number.
Two.
All right, so we're gonna play that twice in a row.
[STRUMMING GUITAR]
One more time.
[STRUMMING GUITAR]
Now let's put it all together.
The fat note four times, the dot two times.
[STRUMMING GUITAR]
Now repeat.
One, two, three, four.
One, two.
One, two, three, four.
[STRUMMING GUITAR]
I-- we just wrote a song.
On your own guitar, pick any notes, any dots, any numbers.
Play them in a consecutive order and repeat,
and then you're a songwriter.
There's no mysterious mystique.
You and Paul McCartney are now songwriters, OK?
There's a longer route to writing "Let It Be,"
but there's no difference between you,
as a person who can hold a pick and have a guitar in your hand,
to become a songwriter right now today.
The same thing applies with playing simple chords.
If you can look-- like, I've got a six-year-old kid at home.
And the other day, I was like, I'm gonna
teach you how to write a song.
He said, dad, that's impossible.
I said, no it's not.
We did the same principle.
He just held his finger right here.
It's an E minor 7 chord, but you don't need to know that.
Just hold your finger right there
and strum all the strings.
[STRUMMING GUITAR]
And now put that finger on the dot on the fattest string.
[STRUMMING GUITAR]
For the sake of our argument, let's do our four strums
on the first one, two strums on the second one.
[STRUMMING GUITAR]
Let's speed it up and see if it sounds like punk rock.
[STRUMMING GUITAR]
And you're a songwriter.
Songwriters are just people that put notes and chords
in a certain order and play them a certain number of times
there's nothing more to it than that.
I discovered that in my basement with my punk rock band,
and the heavens opened.
All of a sudden, I wanted to play guitar
because I don't have to wait.
I didn't have to laboriously slog through a tar
pit of tiresome lessons.
I wasn't working the tar, I was immediately playing the guitar.
And so now you can play the guitar, too,
and write some songs.
[GUITAR SOLO]