Check out Guitar Control instructor Darrin Goodman teaching how to play Take It Easy by The Eagles. Be sure to click the link for the free tabs that go with this How To Play Take It Easy By The Eagles lesson.
Introduction
Hey everybody how’s it going? This is Darrin with GuitarControl.com bringing you this video lesson. Today I want to show you a kind of a simplified acoustic rendition of Take It Easy by The Eagles. So this is a song that I use in my private lessons with students when we’re working on getting down strumming and rhythm; this this is really good song for that. It doesn’t have a lot of really difficult chords or anything and the strumming isn’t difficult but it is the beginning of getting you into like feeling out the rhythm as opposed to memorizing a pattern of so many downs so many ups kind of a thing. Anyway be sure to click on the link in the description for the tabs and let’s get close up and take a look at How To Play Take It Easy By The Eagles.
Take It Easy Chords
All right so the first thing let’s just run through the chords that we’re going to be using for How To Play Take It Easy By The Eagles. We have G; so I’m on the third fret of the low E with my second finger, second fret of the A string with my first finger, the D and G strings are open and I’m on the third fret of the B string with my third finger and the third fret of the high E with my fourth finger. Then we have D major; so for D major I’m playing the D string open and then I’m on the second fret of the G string with my first finger, third fret of the B string with my third finger and second fret of the high E with my second finger. Then we have C major; so I’m on the third fret of the A string with my third finger, second fret of the D string with my second finger, the G string is open, first fret of the B string with my first finger and the high E is open. And then we have E minor; low E open, second fret of the A string with my second finger, second fret of the D string with my third finger and the rest of the strings are all open… Now lets look at the structure of Take It Easy By The Eagles.
How To Play Take It Easy By The Eagles
All right so Take It Easy By The Eagles starts off with a little intro part that starts off just with a G… Now again like I said how I’m doing this is a little bit different from how this song originally is done. When you listen to the album version there’s an entire band and multiple guitar parts so this is a rendition so you can play this by yourself at the next barbecue or camping trip, that kind of a thing. So we’ve got that G and so for the strum here and this is kind of a strum that is themed throughout, but there’s variations on it, so it’s like this is kind of the main idea, but there’s just some variations that will happen throughout it. So for this strum… one strum on that to D back to G, C, D and then G. So this is where it leads up to where the vocals would start; so up to their… So that’s like down, down, up, down, down. Now like I said we want to try to get away from the whole thing of memorizing a pattern, but this is just kind of the rhythm of the song, so it’s like if you were to put the song on and you started you know like… doing a little steering wheel drum beat that can be translated over into down and up strokes, so you have to kind of feel it… Now when you do that and you go off of feel, some places where I have upstrokes you might have down strokes and vice versa; don’t put too much thought into that, you just want to feel it. Where I put in an upstroke might feel like a down stroke for you or the other way around. So starting there from after the intro… that’s where the vocals come in on Take It Easy. If you sing the song while you’re playing, you don’t even need to sing it, you can just “sping” it where the syllables are in the words, there a lot of places where you’re going to change direction with your stroke… So like that… see I’m not even singing it, I’m just saying the words in time with the melody line that that they are singing in the song and it’s helping me with those transitions. So it starts off with that G, D, C… and this is where the first change is going to be and the strumming is just constantly kind of changing; so I got that first part… So you can see right there just in the amount that I’ve played of this we’re only on three chords and we’ve changed the strumming pattern to three different type of things. So you can use what I’m doing is as a guideline, but what you really want to do is just try to feel it out and the first few times you try this it may not be very easy and you might feel like that you’re not doing it right, but just keep at it and don’t worry about trying to play it fast; just kind of think about that rhythm and kind of translate that into your strums. So then after this is where it goes into the first Take It Easy so we go to A minor… I don’t think I did this chord at the beginning, so really quick we got the open A string, second fret of the D string with my second finger, second fret of the G string with my third finger, first fret of the B string with my first finger and the high E is open… now we’re back into another verse. So another thing with this is that if you try to do the exact same strumming pattern going into that second verse it’s going to feel a little bit different playing it because the syllables of the words does not line up the same way; so you really kind of want to work with just getting the feel. So a way we can do this, I’m just muting the strings, “well I’m running down the road”, so you get that sort of a little beat and what you’re doing with your right hand might be a down stroke and what you do with your left hand might be an upstroke or it could be the other way around; just know that everybody’s a little bit different. I found with students that I would say the majority of the people that the right is a down and a real easy way to figure it out is just play it one way and then try it the other way and one way is going to feel really natural and one way is probably going to feel really awkward to you. Okay now with this you could also just kind of really simplify this, especially if you’re a beginner and you could just do one strums. So you start off with that and then you could go from there…
Conclusion
All right, so I hope you enjoyed How To Play Take It Easy By The Eagles and you got something out of it. If you like this video give it a thumbs up and leave a comment down below if you have a question or a recommendation for a future lesson. If you have not already done so please subscribe to the channel and click that notification bell so that you don’t miss out any of the content that we upload throughout the week. All right so that is all I’ve got for you today and I hope that this was helpful for you with strumming and maybe you learned a new song. That is all I have for you today. Thanks for watching How To Play Take It Easy By The Eagles and have a great day.
If you want to learn more classic tunes like this one then check out our Ultimate Guitar Song Collection.
