My Girl Guitar Lesson

This epically memorable opening guitar riff was played by the incredible Robert White of The Funk Brothers, Motown’s legendary session band. If you're interested in getting to know a little more about these amazing Motown session players, definitely check out Hitsville: The Making of Motown - It's an amazing film!

One of the main reasons I like to teach this song to students is it's usage of the major pentatonic. Quite often, as guitar players, we build our whole playing career for many years around the minor pentatonic… And with good reason! However, the ying to the minor yang is the major pentatonic. This pentatonic needs to be learnt and My Girl is built using the entirety of the scale, so it's a perfect example.

My Girl Intro Chords & Riff

So let's begin at the start (not a bad place to begin any story or lesson 😂). Before any vocal comes in, we are introduced to this glorious riff. The key of the song is C major, and the intro riff is simply a C major chord. However, rather than playing the C major chord as a chord voicing, we are using the C major pentatonic to play the riff. This highlights the key root, 3rd and 5th of the C major triad, but also uses the 2nd and 6th degrees of the major scale. Here is the major pentatonic scale and box:

As you may have guessed, if you're familiar with pentatonic boxes, this particular octave shown above, that we are using for the riff, is an excerpt from the 5th box of the pentatonic scale, as shown here:

My Girl Verse

Ok so now let's dive into the verse, which in when the vocals come in. The main shift here is that we are now rotating between two chords, the C and the F. This is the I and IV chord in the key of C major, and is an extremely common sound, I'm sure you'll recognise it. Now, just as with the intro, we are not actually playing the chord shapes here, we're using the pentatonic based around each chord to highlight the sound of the chord change.

If this theory is new to you, awesome! This is going to be an exciting day. Essentially, rather than just playing the scale of C major pentatonic over the whole progression, like you might do in a solo for example, you change the pentatonic to match the chord. So we play the C major pentatonic (box 5) for the C major chord (A shape) and F major pentatonic (Box 2 and 3) for the F major chord (E shape). That looks like this:

My Girl Pre-Chorus & Chorus

As we move into the pre-chorus we are taking a break from the lead guitar stuff (or should I say the single note stuff!) and using some chords. In the video I use barre chords here, but you can use open chords as well if you would prefer. Whatever is best for you based on where you are with your playing right now. So, the chords are: | C Dm | F G | which you loop twice. Notice that the chords now change to being two per bar, rather than 1 per bar in the verses. We have a nice simple strumming pattern too, that looks like this:

As for how to play these chords, as I said above, you can choose from either barre chords or open chords, which we've drawn up below. Alternatively of course, if you are more advanced you can use your CAGED system to chop and change between any shapes you like!

Now then, our final section is the chorus. This part is very simple and has the chords: | C | C | Dm | G | which you play just once. Again, we are just using chord shapes here rather than any riffs, and you let the chords ring out this time. And that's it, you have the whole track!

Summary

So as you are putting this track together, simply consider that as you grow as a guitar player, you have many many options for this track. You can use barre chords, open chords, or even CAGED chords for the chordal sections, and the more you become familiar with major pentatonic shapes you can play the riff in a variety of places all over the neck. It's definitely a song that can grow with you, so keep it on your playlist! Good luck!