Hey folks!
Can you please give me some songs that would take an intermediate player to learn in one or two days? And I mean the whole guitar part.
A good example would be Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop, a counter example would be Metallica’s Fade to Black, where the whole song is quite easy, but the solo can take some time.
1979 by Smashing Pumpkins
Ace of Spades by Motorhead Paranoid by Black Sabbath
Blackbird (the Beatles, not the alter bridge one)
Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here is pretty easy all around and fun to play. You get to do some picking out notes and some strumming. The one caveat is that there’s an intro solo that, while easy, is supposed to be a second guitar.
Seconding Pink Floyd, in part because David’s lead parts are catchy, melodic, not difficult to learn, and they’re a great way to learn melodic phrasing.
I came here to suggest R.E.M. as well. Great jangly rhythm guitar parts, interesting chord voicings, and also easy melodic leads for an intermediate player to learn.
All the 90’s pop punk (Offspring, Blink) is very easy.
What genre of music are you looking for?
Don’t really care much for the genre. Probably not modern country though.
Polly and Molly’s Lips by Nirvana are simple, and from what I remember, most Sex Pistols songs are quite straightforward too :)
Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over the Sea album is how I learned how to play guitar. It’s basically all strumming chords.
Great suggestion! Two-Headed boy is my favourite from that album. You can have lots of fun with the dynamics
Without a genre or tempo or style that’s a pretty wide selection to choose from. Even taking an arbitrary limit like songs with ‘big’ in the title gets you a bunch of options: Big rock candy mountain, big iron, the big country, big river, big bang (bass), big shot, big train, big gun. Big love is a little more advanced, but big me is pretty simple. Look at the table of contents in a first 50 or first 100 songs to learn style book for more good choices.
I would mostly just be careful about classical/jazz/bluegrass/metal picks because of the long arpeggios or complex chord shapes. Pop, Rock, r&b, blues, folk are all usually safer picks for a quicker study.
If you’re just playing the chords and singing the song, I’d say you can ignore any solos that are too difficult until you improve.
Nirvana and Red Hot Chilli Peppers songs can be pretty easy with not too hard lead parts.
I found that getting over that initial hump of difficulty was much easier with songs that I knew well, and that I could persevere with to get my skill level up.
Give us your top ten albums and I bet it would be easy to pick some songs
Not sure I can do the whole ten, I’ll try my best
Kreator - Enemy of God
Death - Sound of Perseverance
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
Hypocrisy - Catch 22
Children of Bodom - Follow the Reaper
Alestorm - Back Through Time
Cannibal Corpse - Gore Obsessed
Carpenter Brut - Trilogy
Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
Necrophobic - Mark of the NecrogramThis is the whole reason I created this post – I’m not too exposed to the easier to learn kinda music
Oh dang OK. Metal then. The hardest genre maybe! Are there any pop or basic rock songs you like enough to learn to get you started?
No worries if not but metal, thrash, speed stuff is going to be technically a lot harder than pretty much any other genre. I don’t think that means you can’t learn it but it will make it less easy for sure
I’m going to give these songs a quick scan soon and see if any of these seem easier than others
Aw, mate, I appreciate it, but you don’t have to! The reason I asked the original question is my teacher says it’s a good idea to work through some easy songs alongside my main goal (which is Heartwork by Carcass atm). That way brain feel good, and I’ve got more songs in my repertoire, which is never bad.
Anyways, thank you very much for the offer, but please do not torture yourself with something you don’t want to listen to on my behalf xD
I did have a quick blast of some of them, but yeah, these compositions are at the extreme end of difficulty and the definition of running before walking which will make the process of learning much much harder.
What you want are fairly middle of the road rock songs that you like, that you can learn and progress with. Then for the type of playing you’re ultimately aiming for, you’ll also require heavy practice on scales and improving speed and strength… This is a long term goal and definitely not an overnight challenge
Bear in mind also that on a lot of those metal albums the guitarist is using open or dropped tunings to make the chugging bits easier, as well as a ton of effects.
When I was learning I did find that having some distortion, overdrive or fuzz on helped to mask some of the mistakes I was making and let me continue playing until I improved.
I might recommend learning something by Queens of the Stone Age or similar. It’s metal ish but definitely more playable. Either way, get to the point where you can play the chords to some way simpler songs you like first, then start looking at lead/solos once you have the rhythm down, then start learning fifths and modes and stuff, as you will need to know your scales if you want to shred
Best of luck!
