Wild Thing Guitar Lesson

Wild Thing is perfect for beginner and improver students, as it focuses on your open chord shapes and relatively simple rhythms. There are a few cool edges though, that make it a little more quirky and tougher to play… The E played as a D shape is one of those (more on that later) and the range of rhythm patterns is the other.

In fact, I would say that the rhythm is the toughest thing to get here, but also the most important. The chords with the rhythm combined produce the riff, and if one of those elements is off, the riff loses some of it's potency. Do not fear though good people, we will be breaking all of it down in great detail!

Wild Thing Intro

Now just before we dive into the intro part, you will notice we have a section of the play-through with our amazing YGA band at the beginning of this video. If you want to see the whole thing, scroll to the bottom of the page where you can watch Camille, Harrison and myself play it wonderfully! Now, onto the lesson…

The core chords for this track, which are played in the intro, verse and basically all sections, are A, D and E major chords. Lovely and simple. We actually play the A and D in basic open chord positions, as you can see below, but we're playing the E slightly differently. Take a look at this diagram:

As you can see, the E chord looks identical to the D major chord. It pretty much is in fact, with the only difference that we are moving up two frets to play it. This is a pretty cool, and relatively simple bit of theory applied to the guitar. E major is a tone higher than D major, so it makes sense that by taking the chord shape of D up two frets (1 tone) you get an E major. In fact, this concept is the foundation of the whole CAGED system, but we don't need that at this point. Something to ponder on for later, perhaps!

Now let's get into the rhythm. This is where it gets a little more tricky. We are using a 16th note strumming pattern which an improver guitarist may be familiar with, but a beginner may not Either way, this is a great challenge and certainly not beyond anyone working on it. The pattern looks like this:

The pattern consists of mainly down strokes, which is good, but to get that authentic upstroke in there, we need to be strumming at the rate of 16th notes. We are therefore counting "1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a". When you first start doing this it's a tough concept to grab, but with a little practice, you'll get it.

If you are a beginner and this is a little too overwhelming for the moment, no problem, simply do the strumming pattern without the muted string hits. This will ensure all your hits are downstrokes, and will end up looking like this:

As you'll notice in all of our courses, we encourage keeping the hand moving consistently when you strum. This is crucial for keeping your rhythm rock solid. If in doubt about reading the rhythm here, use your ear! Keep your arm moving in time and hit those beats as you hear them in the track.

Wild Thing Verse

Now we have spent the time on the intro, the verse will be extremely easy. It's actually less complicated than the intro as it repeats the same strumming pattern over the chords. So we have a similar progression: | A D | E D | which loops around for the whole verse. The only difference here is we return to the D major after the E. Within that we are taking the first strumming pattern and playing it twice, which looks like this:

There are two other elements in the track to be aware of. The first is the breakdown, which is one cool little riff on loop. You are essentially playing an A to G major chord, except as we are only dealing with the D, G and B strings, the G major can be simply open strings! This gives us access to a very nice little riff. The riff with the rhythm looks like this:

After that, you also have the ending of the track to consider, which hangs on the E major chord. It's a very cool way to end the song and we have one final rhythm pattern to work through (I did say the rhythm would be the biggest challenge here!), which is this:

The band plays Wild Thing

Once you feel like you are getting the track sounding good, try playing along with our YGA band! Camille is on the drums, Harrison on the bass and of course it's me on the guitar! This is a great way to test your new skills, and get a feel for playing along with a band! Good luck, and see you soon.