Seven Nation Army Guitar Lesson

This song is an absolute anthem of the 21st Century, being heard in sports venues, adverts, various remixes and more, all around the globe. Play this riff anywhere you are, and I guarantee there will be people singing along to it. For this reason alone it's worth knowing, but from a guitar student point of view, this is a must know song for the powerchord practice it offers.

When you are a beginner / early intermediate player, powerchords are a huge part of your development, and being able to transition powerchords up and down the neck seamlessly, is an important part of learning. This song will allow you to practice that, whilst learning an iconic riff and super fun song to play along to.

So, without further ado, let's dive into it…

Seven Nation Army Riff

There is nowhere else we can start, other than the main riff. This is a looping riff, using the E minor scale on a single string, with a very specific rhythm. As Franco talks about in the video, rather than trying to learn the note values, this is the kind of riff that you simply need to be able to sing. If you can sing the riff, you can play… Simple as that!

So, let's start by visualising that E minor scale on the neck. As you may know by now, we don't work too much with tab here in our song blog posts, as we want you to develop your ear and understanding of the guitar theory. Franco plays the riff clearly and with detail in the video, so use that first, then use the theory here to deepen your understanding.

Now, once you have played this riff around multiple times, we eventually get to the transition part of the song. This is the part of the song that builds towards the next section, and we return to this part many times. It's actually super simple, as it's just two chords. Those chords are | G5 | A5 | - Two powerchord shapes. Those chords look like this:

As for the groove here, it's a very simple 8th note downstrum pattern, meaning that you can "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and" whilst strumming all downstrokes. You do this one time round on each chord and it looks like this:

So there we have your first task! Get together the verse and the transition, and when you're ready we're go into the chorus below.

The Chorus Section

At this point we really level up the difficulty of the song, as we essentially need to take the same riff, but play the notes all as powerchords. On top of that, there are two riffs, back to back now, which are very similar but do have a variation at the end. The first decision you need to make here is do you want to play the powerchords using two fingers, or three fingers. Like this:

So we're once again following the E minor scale on one string, just this time with full powerchord shapes. This is tough to do if you haven't moved the powerchords around like this before, so please take your time with it. Good luck, and we'll see you in another blog post!