Guitar lesson - How to Save a Life by The Fray

Go to http://yourguitarsage.com/ to find out how to get charts to 100s of songs!!! This guitar lesson vid shows you how to play How to Save a Life.

All right a guitar here and we’re going to learn How to Save a Life by The Fray today. And this song, you’re going to need a capo to hold for. This is a capo attaches to your guitar that allows you to change the keys easily where you can play all your open chords, G, D, C, those are the things. You got to get a capo. People e-mail me all the time and say, “Do I need to have a capo?” Yes, you need capo. You need an underwear, and you need a capo. Suppose you don’t have to have underwear but you got to have a capo. Your mom wants you to wear underwear; your mom wants you to have a capo, so get a capo. All right here we go. So the capo would act on the third fret and we got here our chords. We got a G, and do you see me looking on to the right? I’m looking on my chart, the chart that you can get at yourguitarsage.com, check it out. I also teach about strumming methods and everything else. Here we go, we got a G; we got a D, it’s where our D looks like. But this D that we’re playing has a G flat on the bass so what I want you to do is reach your thumb around and play this on the 2nd fret or we’re calling the 2nd fret. The second note from your capo. You’re going to play that and you’re just doing this on your thumb. Younger hands or smaller hands can’t do it we’re going to have a hard time with it. So I guess there are a lot of students are around 10 or so I think kind of having a hard time grabbing that note there. So when you’re 18 years, you can—your hands are developed enough, we can grab that. But keep trying this because—don’t pretend that you can’t do it. There are some kids that can do it at that age all right. So here we go, we got a G, a D with that G flat on the bass, an Em, and a C chord. If you can play those chords, you can play this song really well. Therefore, we only have the chord that’s in actual D with no G flat on bass. But you’ll notice that’s pretty easy. All right so let’s talk about the rhythm here. The rhythm on this is like so many other songs that you’ve seen in these videos. Its 1, 2, and, and 4 and 1, 2 and, and 4 and 1, 2 and, and 4. So if you don’t know how to do the strumming rhythms, just check out my video on strumming rhythms. It’ll help you. The whole song for the most part is well; there’s a few hits if you 0255 [Demonstration] Those were the things when you just—or hitting on the chords like that. But let’s talk about the intro here. The intro is the same as the verse. There’s no acoustic guitar running in the song about where I'm your lady. We’re playing it as if there were. So here we go. The songs in form 1,2,3,4, and each chord is held out for four beats with the exceptions of the chords. The last measure of the chord is what we call split measure. Its two chords split over four beats. So we’ll come to that in a minute we’re going to do the intro inverse. Intro inverse is going to go like this. [Demonstration] That’s it. Literally, that’s like 75% of the song, you can do that right there. Just repeat it over and over again. [Demonstration] Now, if we want to add rhythm to this, then do that 1, 2 and, and 4 and rhythm. That rhythm will go for the same, and for the chords as well. So that gets us through the intro and the verse with repeat several times in the song. And then the chord is-- [Demonstration] Here’s got the split measure. A little tricky, but you’ll get it, back into the verse. Again, the rhythm is going to be like-- [Demonstration] That’s going to be the rhythm there. [Demonstration] So at the end there, you can just do this. Man! That is the whole song. There’s no bridge in it. So, that’s it. Intro, verse, and chords and the intro verse are the same. You know, these 4 chord forms, you got this whole song down. Go get a capo, if you don’t have one It’s going to make it so much easier otherwise you’re going to have to play a bunch of bar chords and if you’re new guitar player. Well, even as an older guitar player. It’s not very fun to play a bunch of bar chords. So go ahead and save yourself some part that you can get a capo. All right, check out yourguitarsage.com and I’ve got a slew of other songs out there to learn on YouTube, and then the charts are available at the website. Keep practicing and check back for more videos later.