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A Horse with No Name – Easy 2 Chord Song

Hi Folks, today I’m going to teach you how to play “A horse with no name” by America. It was the bands first single and also their most popular one.

It’s a delightful song to play in all its simplicity. Once you get the hang of the strumming pattern you really get into the flow and the vibe of the song. You’ll love it.

A Horse with No Name – Easy 2 Chord Song

“A horse with no name” is an easy song that is a must song for beginner guitar players. The song contains 2 chords: Em and D6-9/F#. While the D6-9/F# chord name sounds complicated the chord itself is really easy to play.

Em = 022000

D6-9/F# = 2×0200

Here’s how to read chord diagrams and other chord notation like the one above.

A horse with no name – strumming pattern:

The song has two easy to follow strumming patterns:

Em = ↓↓↑↓↓↑

D6-9/F# = ↓↑↓↑↓↑↓↑

Watch the video guitar lesson below to learn the entire song step by step.

Enjoy!

4 Chord Guitar Songs

By Klaus Crow 5 Comments

Learning to play guitar can seem a bit challenging, but did you know you can play millions of songs with just four easy guitar chords? Yes you can, absolutely!

With 4 simple guitar chords you can play songs from any genre like pop, rock, campfire or 60’s songs. Choose your pick.

4 Chords for Most Songs

The 4 chords, 4 chord progression and 4 chord songs are related to the 80/20 principle. It means that 20% of causes / input (20% of all chords and progressions) leads to 80% of results / output (80% of the songs). The 80/20 principle, als called the Pareto principle, can be applied to all things in life, and for guitar playing we can see it in learning 4 chord songs.

There are a few basic chords that you need to learn. With those basic chords you can build the most common 4-chord-progressions to play almost any song you want.

4 Chord Progressions

You can build a 4 chord progression from the notes of the major scale or natural minor scale. In music we use roman numerals to indicate the order of chords in a chord progression. Let’s take the chords built of the C Major scale for example – The key of C:

I = C Major
ii = D minor
iii = E minor
IV = F Major
V = G Major
vi = A minor
vii = Bdim.

Now one of the most common 4 chord progression is I – V – vi – IV ( 1 – 5 – 6 – 4 ) If we follow the numeral numbers in the key of C we end up with the chord progression: C – G – Am – F. You can follow this chord progression throughout the whole song.

Building Chords and Progressions of The Minor Scale

By Klaus Crow 24 Comments

Photo by Bigstockphoto
Once I learned how to build chords of a major or minor scale, the logic of chord progressions made much more sense.

I became more efficient in analyzing and memorizing chord progressions and it was also a helpful tool for song writing and understanding how to improvise over these chords.

As a young kid I underestimated the knowledge of music theory.

It don’t matter how musically gifted you are as a person, music theory makes the life of a musician a lot easier. So benefit and enjoy!

In this post you’ll learn how to build chords of the minor scale, create your own chord progressions and analyze the chord progressions of famous songs in a minor key.

For building chords of the natural minor scale we can use the same approach as building chords of the major scale

Like the major scale we can also build 7 chords of the minor scale. In fact the minor scale is relative to the major scale. When you play the major scale starting on the 6th degree and play seven notes ascending (going up) in the scale you are actually playing a minor scale.

Building Chords and Progressions of The Major Scale

By Klaus Crow 22 Comments

Photo by Bigstockphoto
Knowing how to build chords and chord progressions is a really great tool for writing your own songs and communicating with your fellow musicians on how to play a certain piece of music, “Let’s play a 1 4 5 progression in the key of…”

You can create the most beautiful chord progressions and songs by ear and you don’t necessarily need to know music theory for that, but it makes the life of a musician a lot easier if you do know some music theory on this part.

It’s nice to know what other musicians are talking about and how you can create chord progressions in a more effective and efficient way.

Adding music theory knowledge will reveal a lot of secrets you wish you had known before, so don’t wait for later or you’ll miss out on all the good stuff. Music theory will definitely make you a better musician!

Now let’s dive in:

From the major scale you can build 7 diatonic chords. The major scale consists of 7 notes, so that’s one chord of each note.

Let’s take the C major scale for example.

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