Hey, how’s it going on this is Sean Daniel with Guitar Control, I’m excited about this lesson today this is one of my favorite super simple acoustic guitar songs that sounds prettier than it is hard to play “Nightingale” by Norah Jones excellent album excellent song people love this one live. Really easy to play, easy to remember and only has two parts.
Click the Tabs button to follow the chords and tabs.
It’s really an exceptionally simple song only three chords and a great introduction into adding melody to record it’s going to sound a little bit like this. We have A major, G major, and D major, you play the whole song following along with that chord chart. The chord progression for that would be A major open A to D to G to be open E, (optionally) however you want to play it, these three fingers use your fingers you can borrow, you want to smash your hand that position it’s cool then we’re going to go to a G major chord 3E, 2A open strings in the middle and then 3B and 3E at the bottom that goes very nicely with your favorite D major chord 2E, 3B to G open D back to A so we have an D most of the song in this progression. Just these four chords now it starts and ends with an A, so the thing to remember and a lot of my students who maybe are just starting out when they play that last A that 4th chord and the progression A, G, D, A, they’ll go to the next word know you have to start over again on A, A, G, D, A, A, G, B, A, what makes this song really special is being able to add the melody on top of the chord.
This is really easy all it is 2E open E, 2G, 2G, 2G, we have a little five note kind of lick melody riff then we’re going to add to every chord a version of it to every chord so if we have this A major one add it it’s pretty easy because those notes are a lot of times in the chord, you’ll notice that I just kind of manipulate this A major chord by putting my pinky down to grab that 1st note of the melody and getting off of it to give that E-string and you’ll notice when I leave the B-string it’s open it kind of makes a different chord that’s something that you know you don’t want to think of as being something different from an A major chord even though you can see those like A suspended 2 chord I think it’s more musical just to think of it as an inflection that you’re giving to an A major chord.
Now we’re going to do that same thing with the G major chord remember this is the melody you were looking for bum bum, we’ll do it over a G chord. Now what we want to do is this high E-string 3rd fret we want to lose that and replace that with this 2nd fret okay now this makes a different chord linkage of the G major 7 chord but we’re thinking of it as a melody on top of just a regular G major chord, the best way to do that in my opinion is to just take this regular shape don’t have your pinky on your ring is on the third fret of the B-string and then have your pointer finger take a journey just like the nightingales journey, to the high E-string 2nd fret okay so we’re not getting exactly the bum-bum-bum-bum-bum we could just like that which sounds great again this is just optional this is kind of like a version of how you play because we’re combining a couple different things versus however you want to do it you can do it in different ways but that’s essentially how we’re going to add the bum over a G major chord and this isn’t really a lesson in just this song it’s really how you can add melody to any different chord or and intended for going to be practicing.
Then the 3rd chord of that progression is D super easy to this one because we’re already on the melody while you just have your middle finger down for the first rum open and then focus on this part of the D major chord with your strumming so when I say focused by that maybe just kind of like stopped short and don’t get the highness on the top end of that chord let me go back to A. All together really slow second time around is start on the A again.
Now it changes only one other part we can call this the chorus and all it is if you look at the chord chart you might be like okay G, D, A, G, D, A, G, whatever it’s really just G, D, A, repeated over and over again which is kind of unusual but that’s what gives us a cool kind of sound when I say unusual it’s not unusual to group the G, D, and A chords together what’s unusual is have a four-four count song having three chords of equal time kind of repeated so what I mean by that is like 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, it almost usually there should be a 4th cord to kind of go along with this but we’re going to play these and we’re going to think of these as a three chord progression everybody getting an equal amount of time okay so the other part of the song is just a G, we can still add the melody D, A, start again G, D, A, G, D, and then we go back into the verse.
So again that chorus part you know it’s not super unusual to have like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, because it ends up being an even number of bars but I think a better way to remember how that goes is just thinking of G, D, A, repeating a couple times and then starting again G, D, A, ending on that G, D, A then bring you back like a shortcut to remembering that has helped me out when I think about playing this one live so again it’s a really excellent song, great lesson and maybe adding simple chords on top of simple melodies on top of a chord and make sure you click that link to get the chords because again just beautiful song from a great singer songwriter so hopefully you like that let us know if you have any questions or comments in the comment section below and make sure to subscribe on our You Tube Channel and we’ll see you in our next video lessons, thanks for watching.
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