Learning guitar is much easier when you actually like the songs you’re practising.
So, following on from my first Easy Guitar Songs That Don’t Suck lesson, here are five more genuinely good songs that are approachable for beginner and improving guitarists.
We’ll start ridiculously easy with Seven Nation Army and gradually make things more challenging, finishing with 1979 by The Smashing Pumpkins.
There are no barre chords required, and I’ve simplified things where it makes sense without simplifying them so much that they stop sounding like the song.
The five songs
- Seven Nation Army – The White Stripes
- 505 – Arctic Monkeys
- In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – Neutral Milk Hotel
- Song 2 – Blur
- 1979 – The Smashing Pumpkins
Seven Nation Army – The White Stripes
Difficulty: Very easy
Tuning: Standard
Main skill: Single-note riffs and power chords
If you’ve only just picked up a guitar, start here.
The main Seven Nation Army riff can be played entirely on one string with one finger. It’s one of the easiest recognisable riffs you can learn.
Start on the 7th fret of the A string:
7 – 7 – 10 – 7 – 5 – 3 – 2
Don’t worry about playing it quickly at first. Concentrate on getting the rhythm and the gaps between the notes right.
Once you can play the single-note version comfortably, you can make the riff sound much bigger by turning the notes into power chords.
The fretting movement stays essentially the same — you’re just adding the fifth above each root note.
[IMAGE: SEVEN NATION ARMY POWER-CHORD TAB]
That makes Seven Nation Army a particularly good beginner song because you can learn a very easy version first and then upgrade it as your playing improves.
Beginner tip
Keep your fretting hand relaxed and use as little pressure as you can while still getting a clean note. Beginners often squeeze the neck much harder than they need to.
505 – Arctic Monkeys
Difficulty: Very easy
Tuning: Standard
Main skills: Chord changes, dynamics and strumming
505 is a brilliant beginner song because almost the entire thing is built around just two chords:
Dm – Em
That’s it.
The strumming pattern is also fairly straightforward:
Don’t get too hung up on memorising every arrow. Keep your hand moving steadily and concentrate on making the chord changes land in time.
What really makes 505 work is dynamics.
The song begins restrained and gradually becomes bigger, louder and more intense, even though those same two chords keep cycling underneath.
That’s a useful lesson in how much you can do without changing the harmony.
The lead part
There’s also a simple melodic guitar part that you can play around the chords.
I use the open strings where possible to make this much easier for a beginner.
It’s a good example of how the melody is always within the chord – that’s what makes it melodic!
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – Neutral Milk Hotel
Difficulty: Easy
Tuning: Standard
Time signature: 6/8
Main skills: Open chords and strumming
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of my favourite beginner acoustic songs because it uses four extremely familiar chord shapes:
The main progression is:
G – Em – C – D
There are other sections where the progression changes, but the useful thing is that you don’t need to learn a whole new set of chords.
The song reuses these same four shapes in different orders.
That’s also a useful songwriting lesson: sometimes a new section doesn’t need new chords. Simply changing the order can make the harmony feel different.
The 6/8 feel
What gives the song its distinctive rolling feel is the 6/8 time signature.
Rather than counting:
1 – 2 – 3 – 4
think:
1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6
with the strongest pulse falling on 1 and 4.
So it feels like:
ONE two three, FOUR five six
That’s what gives the acoustic guitar that lilting, almost waltz-like motion.
The important difference is that 6/8 is normally felt as two main beats, each divided into three.
The strumming
The biggest thing is to keep your strumming hand moving continuously through those six eighth notes.
Think of one continuous movement, with some strokes sounding and others passing over the strings.
That makes the pattern much easier to feel rather than memorise.
Get the chord changes happening in time first, then gradually add the fuller strumming pattern.
Song 2 – Blur
Difficulty: Easy / improving beginner
Tuning: Standard
Main skill: Movable power chords
Song 2 is where we move away from open chords and start moving one shape around the neck.
And this is one of the great things about power chords.
Once you know the shape, you don’t need to learn a completely new fingering for every chord. Move the same shape to a different fret and you have a different power chord.
Take the riff slowly at first and concentrate on moving the whole power-chord shape as one unit.
Your fingers should keep roughly the same relationship to each other while your hand moves up and down the neck.
The rhythm and muted hits are a big part of what makes the riff sound like Song 2, so once the chord movement feels comfortable, start concentrating on the spaces between the chords as much as the chords themselves.
Add distortion
This is also a very good first song for experimenting with a distorted guitar sound – so if you have an electric guitar, grab it for this one. It’s certainly a lot easier to fret those power chords than on my acoustic.
Keep the quieter parts relatively restrained, then make the louder sections feel genuinely louder.
That quiet/loud contrast is a huge part of the song.
And yes, you’ve got to do the woo-hoo.
1979 – The Smashing Pumpkins
Difficulty: Improving beginner / early intermediate
Tuning: Standard
Main skills: Ringing notes, unusual voicings and fretting-hand control
TUNING: Eb standard (That’s every string a half-step down)
1979 is the hardest song in this lesson.
While the record is in Eb tuning, in my performance in the video above, I’m in standard tuning to make it easier for you to play along.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as the first song you ever learn on guitar, but if you can handle the earlier songs on this page it makes a really good next challenge.
One of the things that makes the guitar part sound more complicated than it is is the way open strings ring against fretted notes.
Instead of playing every note short and separately, try to let the notes overlap.
That creates the dreamy, slightly ambiguous quality that you hear all over 1990s alternative guitar.
You don’t necessarily need a complicated six-note chord shape to get an interesting sound.
Sometimes two or three fretted notes with an open string ringing through them sounds much more distinctive.
Learn it in small pieces
1979 is one where I definitely wouldn’t try to learn the entire part in one go.
Take a small section of the riff, play it slowly until your fingers know the movement, then add the next section.
Gradually join the pieces together and only increase the tempo once you can play everything cleanly.
The goal isn’t to immediately keep up with Billy Corgan.
It’s to make the movements feel automatic first.
Which song should you learn first?
If you’re completely new to guitar, start with Seven Nation Army or 505.
Once basic chord changes feel comfortable, try In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
Then move onto the power chords in Song 2.
Finally, use 1979 as your stretch song.
That gives you a nice progression from a one-finger riff through open chords and strumming to movable power chords and more unusual alternative-rock guitar parts.
More easy guitar songs that don’t suck
This is Part 2 of the series.
In the first lesson I covered songs by Oasis, Nirvana, The Strokes, Radiohead and Pixies.
Part one is here:
I’ve also put together a much bigger collection of beginner-friendly songs here.
And if there’s a genuinely good beginner song you think I should include in Part 3, let me know in the comments here or on YouTube.
