Today we’re going over our first song riff. This riff, adapted from Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” will include the chords we went over last week: A major, D major, and E major. If you need to check them out again, you can see that lesson by clicking here.
Click here for the guitar tabs for the entire modified version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in A major: Blowin’ In The Wind Tab
The video shows the last two lines of the 2nd page. When you can do those last two lines, you can easily do the first 6!
Now that we’re comfortable forming the chords A, D, and E, let’s put them to use in a song. This example comes from the chorus of “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and gives you ample opportunities to practice switching between the chords.
The strumming is incredibly simple on purpose to allow you to focus just on the chords for now. Once you’ve become comfortable switching between these three chords, it will be easy to focus on more exciting strumming patterns, but for now, we’ll keep it simple so we can divide and conquer these different individual guitar skills.
Remember: If you’re running into difficulties or getting frustrated, don’t be afraid to slow way, way down, and to simplify by only practicing one component at a time—for example, just a transition between D and E several times slowly, until the motion feels natural.
Moving between these chords, you might find that you notice several familiar sounds from other songs. The relationship of these three chords is an example of an extremely common pattern in modern Western music. This provides an added bonus: when you’ve become comfortable playing and transitioning between these chords, you’ll get to use them over and over again in other songs!