Easy songs for guitar players? Define easy!
I’ve spent the last 20 years of my career as a guitar teacher trying to find gold in the stacks of cds that I have and my various roommates owned. “Gold” refers to songs by popular artists that are easy for beginners to play, and they’re gold because easy songs by popular artists keep students interested in playing the guitar, and that increases the chances that they practice, stick with it, and become good guitar players. Over time, my definition of “easy” has evolved and become more specific, and that’s part of why I started the “Easy Song Library.” I wanted to offer better choices for beginners, as there are a lot of websites that rank higher than mine that give really bad advice about what is easy. I also wanted to try to develop a system that would make it easier for me to do what I do, and decrease the number of students who quit because guitar is “too hard.”
Fast songs are harder to play than slow songs
The first thing I started looking at was the tempo of songs. Faster means harder, BUT, there’s more to it than just the tempo. If a song is played at 120 beats per minute and the guitar player is strumming 8th notes, that’s really just as fast as a guitar player strumming 16th notes at 60 beats per minute. When it comes to rhythm guitar, the other thing that comes into play is the frequency of chord changes. If the guitarist is switching chords every 2 beats, that’s going to be more difficult than play than learning a song where the guitar player is switching chords every 2 measures.
How complex is the pattern?
Occasionally I see websites saying that “American Pie” is an easy song, because it’s all open chords, and I laugh. Yes, it is all open chords, and the pattern of chord changes during the chorus is pretty simple. Unfortunately, the verse pattern is about 36 chords long, meaning that he played G, C, D, Em, Am, and D7, but mixed them up into a very, very long pattern that never repeats. Just because he only used those 6 chords doesn’t mean he played a simple pattern over and over again. The same goes for guitar riff songs. A song like Hey Bulldog by the Beatles is easier than Whole Lotta Rosie by AC/DC even though the riff in Hey Bulldog is 2 measures long and the one in Whole Lotta Rosie is 1 measure. The one in Hey Bulldog is played at a much slower tempo than the one in Whole Lotta Rosie, and that makes it easier to master for beginner guitar players.
What is the pick hand doing?
Some songs might be listed by a website as being easy for beginners because there are only 3 chords in the song, but if the chords are picked (or, “arpeggiated”) instead of strummed, it will not be easy, especially for someone without experience in that playing style. Also, not all strumming patterns are simple alternate strumming like Dead Flowers by the Rolling Stones. Some, like Wonderwall by Oasis, have pretty complicated strumming patterns that are important to the sound of the song.
Taking all of these things into account when deciding whether or not to learn a song will increase the chances that you’ll actually be able to learn it. The last thing you should keep in mind if you’re in your first few months of playing guitar is that you probably won’t be able to play any song at the same speed as the recording. You can use Windows Media Player to slow down music and keep the pitch the same, and I usually have students slow songs down to around 70% of the original tempo. Over time, you can increase this speed, and also adjust it up or down based on how fast the song is.