Guitar songs for beginners need to have two qualities: They must be easy to play and sound great.
Even though the internet is filled with guitar tabs and YouTube videos it can be difficult to find easy guitar songs for beginners, so we made you a list. 🙂
In this free guitar lesson you will learn:
- 5 cool guitar songs for beginners that develop your chord accuracy.
- 6 strumming patterns that will enhance your musicality and rhythm
- Links to our top 5 resources for guitar beginners
Over 100,000 guitar-learners get our world-class guitar tips & tutorials sent straight to their inbox: Click here to join them
Ready? Let’s get started.
It’s strangely hard to find good guitar songs for beginners online, so we made a list of 5 tracks that we often use with our students.
Here’s what we came up with…
1) ‘Songbird’ by Oasis
‘Songbird’ was the fourth single from Oasis’s album ‘Heathen Chemistry’ and was the first single written by Liam Gallagher. It’s a sweet acoustic track.
Check it out. The video is terrible, so just focus on the music! (The music starts at 39 seconds.)
This is one of the best guitar songs for beginners because A) it’s easy and B) it really helps to develop your strumming ability.
This song only has two chords and sounds great an acoustic guitar. To play ‘Songbird’ we only need G6 and Em7:
If you don’t understand these chord diagrams read this: How To Read Chordboxes In 60 Seconds
To change between G6 and Em7, all we need to do is lift that middle finger off. Dead easy!
If you want to fill this out a little bit more you should play Em, instead of Em7. This makes it a little bit harder, but I think it makes it sound a lot better.
- So for the easiest possible option, go with the Em7 chord shown above.
- To make it sound fuller use Em instead of the Em7. The chord of Em looks like this:
Em
The intro to this song is two bars of G6:
G6 | |
After that it’s basically four bars of G6 followed by four bars Em7 in a repeating pattern.
G6 | | | |
Em7 | | | |
.
‘Songbird’ is a short and sweet song, not much longer than two minutes and has a very consistent feel. No complicated time changes or anything like that. Just a nice, simple repeating chord pattern.
So how do we strum ‘Songbird’?
The best approach is to pluck the bass note (the sixth string) first and then strum the whole chord down then back up.
For a clearer explanation of how to strum ‘Songbird’, watch this video from Andy:
When I play this song along with the record, I tend to follow the tambourine as it’s quite prominent in the mix and seems to keep the beat nicely for a matching guitar strum.
The G6 and the Em7 are both quite forgiving chords as they use all six strings, so we can get away with strumming them quite freely, however this song has quite a tight strumming feel, so keep the pace up!
Guitar songs for beginners need to be easy and fun, but we also want them to challenge you and improve you. This track fits the bill, particularly with regard to rhythmic strumming.
A few other points on this track…
While it can be an advantage to have a lot of bars of the same chord as it means we’re not constantly changing from this chord to that chord, the negative side of that is it can be a bit easy to forget which bar we’re on and lose our place.
- It’s important with songs like this to concentrate to ensure we play the right number of bars for each chord.
- One way to be sure of this is to count the beats as you play, but some people find that approach a bit too ‘robotic’.
- Singing along will help, and tapping your foot to the beat is a fantastic way to ‘ground’ yourself in the timing of the track.
When playing along, make sure you can hear both your guitar and the record in equal measure.
Learn 12 EASY beginner chords with our popular guide
✅ Stop struggling. Start making music.
✅ Learn beginner-friendly versions of every chord.
This is our most popular guide and it will improve your chord ability quickly! 😎
Get your own personalised guitar-learning plan 🎸
Get a custom guitar-learning plan here: Click here for GuitarMetrics™
World-Class Guitar Courses 🌎
Learn from the world's best guitar educators: Click here for our guitar courses
2) ‘Born In The USA’ by Bruce Springsteen
This is probably the most famous song by ‘The Boss’. It’s the opening track from his 1984 album of the same name and it’s fun to play on both electric and acoustic guitar.
This is one of my favourite guitar songs for beginners because it’s so simple.
Why is this one of the easiest guitar songs for beginners?
It only has two chords! The chords for this song are Asus2 and Dsus2.
How to play this track…
If you have a capo, put it on on the second fret of your guitar so you’ll be in tune with the record. (If you don’t have a capo, don’t worry about it. Just play these chords without the capo.)
The great thing about these chords is they only use two fingers each and it’s quick and easy to change between the two.
When switching between these two chords, I like to use the first two fingers (index and middle) for the Asus2 and the second two fingers (middle and ring) for the Dsus2. That way, the middle finger can stay where it is for both chords.
- When changing to the Dsus2, think: “Index finger off, ring finger on.”
- When chaning back to the Asus2, think: “Ring finger off, index finger on.”
Basically, the sequence is four bars of Asus2 and four bars of Dsus2 repeating throughout the entire song.
Asus2 | | | |
Dsus2 | | | |
How do we strum it?
There’s a few ways we could approach it. Watch this video for some suggestions:
Guitar songs for beginners need to be easy to strum and you’ll note that I recommended starting off with quite sparse strumming, building up to more ‘filled out’ strumming.
(If you listen to the song, that’s kind of what happens. You have quite a sparse intro and then everything kicks in.)
These strumming suggestions are of course just that: Suggestions. Don’t be afraid to do your own thing with the strumming once you get into it. So long as we’re in time and have the right feel, we’re good.
When you’re exploring guitar songs for beginners it’s important you try to put your own stamp on things. As a musician you have total freedom to interpret songs how you want. Explore this! 🙂
Check this article out: How To Strum A Guitar With Rhythm & Musicality
Get our best guitar tips & videos
Where should we send it?
