Jumpin’ Jack Flash
Check out this Killer Guitar Lesson on How to Play “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by The Rolling Stones.
Hey, how’s it going this is Jon McLennan with Guitar Control, I hope you’re doing fantastic and I’m bringing you this video lesson on a song called “Jumping Jack Flash” by The Rolling Stones.
Check the image above to follow the chords and tabs.
We’re going through three basic riffs that should get you through the song, let’s get started we’re going to zoom in and break it down so the way I play this is more off the live version that I’ve seen on you tube, so I’ve done a few things to be able to play this rendition I’ve got the capo on the fourth fret and then I’m tuned to open g, I’m going full Keith Richards here and just playing with five strings, I have no sixth string, but if you have your sixth string and you want to do this. It would be d, and then g, d, g, b, d, that’s the tuning that I’m in and minus the sixth string, then you capo the fourth fret so it’s a little bit of a journey just to arrive at this kind of sound. Then at that point I can play this riff, and you could play the open three strings, the fifth, the fourth, and the third or If you want you can play all the strings.
What I like to do is put this fifth on top which makes it more rock. So what I’m doing there is putting my first finger on the third fret from the capo three, and five there. Then you get this sound, I’ll do two quarter notes with down strums like this one, two, and a lot of that’s in the attack with how my right hand is kind of snapping on the strings, not really hitting hard, but’s in the approach and what I’m doing there is playing the fifth fret on the fifth string, and then going zero on the third and fourth strings, and then three on those strings three and four is the rhythm.
How I strum? Most of the time I put my down stroke on down beats and strong beats, my upstroke comes on the weak beat. What that means is one, two, three, four, are all downs and then the ands are up, so if I apply that kind of pattern I’ve got one, two, three, and four, and that five is going to be on an upstroke, then down on the open zeros, and up on the last three. What it does, it locks in with my foot when my foot is tapping.
For the second measure, I’m going to continue that sort of going through those few notes there. The first measure is and then the second measure I’m going to do it again five, zero, three, two, zeros, and then work it around again five, zero, three, it’s just sort of a merry-go-round of those notes, so one, two, three, and four.
I’m always coming to that five on an upstroke so it’s up, down, up, up, down, up, up, down, up, and then proceed with the two open, another thing that he do a lot is kind of dramatically strumming the chord and that’s really cool basically it’s just down, up, down, down, up, down, but really fast. See if you can incorporate those in.
Let’s move on to riff b, it goes to a series of bar chords and the cool thing about being an open g is you have a chord on open strings which means as you move up the fret board you can bar one finger and get all kinds of chords with just one finger, that’s why slide players like this a lot because it can slide around the entire chords. I’m going to start on the third fret and going to bar five strings, I’m going to do, two down strokes like this, and then my kind of rhythm is the basic rhythm like one, two, three, and on to that last. I’m actually going to slide up to the 10th fret from the cable.
There’s the tenth and then the next chord is going to be at the fifth fret, if I will play the basic chords it would be like, and then back to my open sort of open strings so you’ll notice that those are coming on the and four, and changes one, two, three, four, and it goes around. The next thing you can add to is sort of little embellishments off, of the cord, which you hear a lot of and that sounds like this. What I’m doing there is holding down that bar and grabbing other notes and this kind of basic idea, you go three, when I go up to 10, put my third finger down on the 12th fret of the third string, and then when I’m on the fifth I grab eight, seven, five, so it’s a little walking melody.
The third and final riff is the rift c, and what I’m going to do is start by playing the open strings. What I’ve got is two zeros, one, two, and then play a couple of eighth notes and then move up to the fifth fret, so it’s like one, two, three, four, ten, that’s a five I just take my third finger and smash it down across those strings on the fifth, fourth, and third zero, and then repeat.
I hope this inspires you to keep playing and keep practicing guitar. Make sure to subscribe on our You Tube Channel and we’ll see you in our next video lessons, thanks for watching.
