Blackbird Guitar Lesson

I'm quite confident in saying that 'Blackbird' by The Beatles is one of the most recognisable (acoustic) guitar intros of all time. Whether you're a Beatles fan or not, it's hard to not want to pick a guitar up and play along with the tranquil melody. This lesson is going to help you understand how each section works in detail, as well as outline the important techniques that really bring it to life!

Before we get into the write-up, you'll want to be sure to check out Thomas' fantastic video lesson! As a disclaimer, there won't be any tabs of the track in this write-up, so please refer back to the video to get all the details of what frets to play. This is the perfect way to train your ears and fast-track any future songs you want to tackle!

Right-hand technique

Hopefully you will have watched the intro section of the video lesson by the time you're reading this. And if you have, you'll have heard Thomas stress the importance of the right-hand technique before approaching all the chord changes across the fretboard. As far as I'm aware, the right-hand technique used in this track doesn't have a specific name. So, for the sake of this lesson, I'm going to name it the 'pluck-brush' technique. If you can come up with a better name (which doesn't seem too difficult of a task), please be sure to let us know in the comments of the video!

Let's start with the 'pluck' part of the technique first. We're going to be plucking with both the thumb, and your middle finger. You can use your index instead, but most people will find the middle finger to be more comfortable. The thumb is going to be in charge of plucking the E and A string, and the middle finger will be plucking the B and top E string. To get used to this, I would hold an E minor chord and practice using your thumb to pluck both the E and A strings separately, as well as the B and high E string with your middle finger. Check out the practice example below:

The 'brush' part is what makes this technique quite tricky. Before we jump into using the technique for the track, let's look at a few steps to break it down.

Step 1: Firstly, I want you to choose a chord progression and strumming pattern of your choice that you're incredibly comfortable with. Now play that progression, but play the strumming pattern with just your chosen finger (I would suggest using your middle finger). This will help you become more familiar with down- and up- strums with a 'new' finger.

Step 2: The next step after becoming comfortable strumming with your chosen finger is to play the same pattern as lightly as possible. This will help you control your dynamics to get the right feel for Blackbird.

Step 3: Reduce the strumming motion and just target the top three strings. This might feel quite odd at first as the motion is far more limited, but you'll get the hang of it! Try and use your wrist to create most of the motion. Relying on 'flicking' your finger will make it harder to keep the rhythm going, more difficult to keep it soft dynamically, and you might occasionally feel 'caught' by the strings.

Step 4: Add the 'pluck' into the technique, and practice alternating between the pluck and the brush.

Left-hand chords

Now that you're familiar with the right-hand technique, we can have a look at how to play all the different chords shapes that make this beautiful track.

Many songs usually use about four to six different chord shapes throughout the song… I counted seventeen in Blackbird! So, to keep things from getting too messy, I'll provide the information needed to learn the various shapes needed for each section as they come up. It'll be your mission to put them in the right place on the fretboard!

However, we don't want to, play the full shapes for any of the chords for this track. This is because we only need to play the 1st and 3rd degree - which is known as a shell chord. If this is a new term to you, all it means is that we take the fewest notes possible to convey the harmonic character of a chord.

Another very important thing to note is that the G string needs to constantly ring out for all of the chords in this track, with no exception! And with that said, let's break down the sections!

Intro

The intro is made up of three different chord shapes all belonging within the G major scale - G, Am and Bm. One thing to note is that we're playing G major in two positions.

Once you've found where all the chords belong on the fretboard, piece them together in the order below to form the intro!

Before we move on and have a look at the next sections, let's take a look at the strumming pattern for the G major chord on the 10th fret of the A string and 12th fret of the B string:

Verse

You'll be pleased to know that the verse starts with the same exact pattern as the intro! We just need to add a few more shell chords to be able to play through the entire section.

The first thing to note with these new chords is that some of them are played using the high E string. As we still want the G string to continuously ring throughout this section, we need to mute the B string when playing these shapes. As Thomas explains, the best way to do this is by slightly bringing your index fingers across to just touch the B string. This will mute the B string, allowing you to strum through the top 3 strings without getting any unwanted notes.

You might have also noticed that some of these new chords aren't strictly within the G major scale. We won't go into too much detail in this lesson, but I want to briefly touch on how/why we're getting this lovely chromatic climb on the A string. This is created by using a fun concept called 'secondary dominants'. To put it extremely simply, if we're targeting a chord, let's take the D major as an example, we need to insert the dominant V chord of D major (which would be A7) just before we get to D major. We can always look at this in another lesson in more detail!

We're still using shell voicings for the secondary dominant chords, but instead of playing the 1st and 3rd degree, we're targeting the 3rd and b7th degree for the shapes on the A string, and the 1st and 7th for the D7 starting on the D string.

I'll be kind and offer a bit of help with the dominant 7 chords starting on the A string before we jump into the progression. The lowest note is the 3rd and not the root in these voicings, which gives us the following dominant 7 chords: A7 for the shape of 4 (A) and 3 (e), and B7 for the shape of 6 (A) and 5 (e).

This is great point to refer back to the video and to see how Thomas is playing each of the shapes in sequence. I've attached the progression below, but the video will help with the rhythm!

Post-verse fill

The first verse is followed by a quick fill, which is very similar to the ending of the verse with a few tweaks in the chords. At this point, we have seen all the various chord shapes needed - we now just need to piece them all together! See below for the chord progression of the fill.

Bridge

The bridge section repeats one main pattern with a slightly different ending the second time around. To play the changed ending for the second repeat, we simply need to continue down to an A7 chord from the Bb, instead of going back up to C major. From there on, we finish the phrase with a D7, then back to G - exactly the same as the final three chords from the post-verse fill.

Break part 1

We're going to directly transition into the first break after playing the bridge section. Luckily for us, this break is essentially the exact same as the intro, with the change of holding the high G shape much longer. In the intro, the pattern over the G chord is played four times. However, we need to repeat the pattern 12 times for this section. That's a lot of repeats… to keep things interesting (and to stay true to the track), we need to gradually slow down as we hit the 9th repeat. So, be sure to count as you're playing!

Break part 2

The second part of the break is more-or-less a mashup between the intro and the post-verse fill with a slightly different rhythm. We want to play the G, Am and Bm shapes just like the intro, but then we continue up to the C shape instead of going to the high G. We then continue back down to the Bm, A7, and one repeat of the D7 chord to finish the section up.

Outro

We're so, so close to finishing up this complex track in its entirely! What's even better is that the outro is just a very slightly tweaked version of the post-verse fill! In fact, it's so similar that it's exactly the same, just repeated twice and with a change on the second ending! It gets even better - the changed ending is simply strumming a full G major chord instead of the plucked pattern.

For good measure, I've attached the full structure of the song below. Be sure to become confident with each section individually before tackling the entire track. As there are so many chords and overlaps, it can become confusing quickly. But, I'm confident that you'll be able to play along with just a bit of practice, and more importantly, that you'll have a fantastic time while doing so! I'll see you all soon for another song lesson!