All it takes to learn these 7 songs is two fingers and three easy chords.

FIRST SONG

Are You Sleeping? (AKA Frere Jacques?)

The First Song I teach my beginning students uses only the Easy G Chord. If my student has some past experience, then I have them use the Full G Chord instead.

Easy G - The First Chord I teach my beginning guitar students. The goal of ModernGuitarApproach.com is to teach others how to play the guitar in the most enjoyable way possible without losing sight of important musical concepts. It is a resource for other guitar teachers, guitar players, and students and is full of guitar lessons, tutorials, free printable songs, beginning and intermediate #guitarlessons, lessons through #guitarsongs, #tablature, sheet music, and #chord charts.

I keep the strum pattern simple by strumming down on every beat. Some students know the English version and some know the French, so I put both in.

Are You Sleeping? This is the first song that I teach my beginning guitar students. It only uses one chord and can be learned on the first lesson. #learnguitar #guitarlesson

You may notice that even with the first song, my student’s learn important musical concepts. They learn what a down strum is:

They also learn what a quarter note strum bar looks like:

Learning to strum down on the beat is an important concept that makes all the difference once you start working on more complicated songs in the future.

SONGS TWO, THREE & FOUR

Oh My Darlin’ Clementine, Oh, Susanna & This Old Man

The next three songs I teach my students use two new chords; Easy C and Easy G7. Easy C and Easy G7 are great chords to learn together because they both use the first finger and all you have to do to switch, is to move your first finger from the first string to the second string. I also provide the Four String C chord, The Full C chord and the Full G7 chord as options for students who may already be familiar with these chords.

Easy G7 - The 2nd Chord I teach my beginning guitar students. The goal of ModernGuitarApproach.com is to teach others how to play the guitar in the most enjoyable way possible without losing sight of important musical concepts. It is a resource for other guitar teachers, guitar players, and students and is full of guitar lessons, tutorials, free printable songs, beginning and intermediate #guitarlessons, lessons through #guitarsongs, #tablature, sheet music, and #chord charts.

Easy C - the 3rd chord I teach my beginning guitar students. The goal of ModernGuitarApproach.com is to teach others how to play the guitar in the most enjoyable way possible without losing sight of important musical concepts. It is a resource for other guitar teachers, guitar players, and students and is full of guitar lessons, tutorials, free printable songs, beginning and intermediate guitar lessons, lessons through guitar songs, tablature, sheet music, and chord charts. — Easy C

Oh My Darlin' Clementine, Oh Susanna, and This Old Man. These are the 2nd, 3rd & 4th songs that I teach my beginning guitar students. They will teach you how to switch between easy C and Easy G7. Both chords use only one finger.

SONGS FIVE AND SIX

The Hokey Pokey & Row, Row, Row Your Boat

These two songs are designed to combine the Easy C and Easy G chords. It is usually in the 3rd lesson that I teach this concept and it’s not uncommon for my students to have completely forgotten the G chord by now. Switching between C and G is harder to do because not only do you have to switch fingers, but you have to switch strings as well.

SONG SEVEN

Polly Wolly Doodle

The next challenge I give my students is to combine all three chords that they now know (Easy G, Easy C and Easy G7) into one song. The musicians Dan Zanes and Sheryl Crow do a great rendition of this song that I like to play for my students, you can find it that version here: Polly Wolly Doodle

It takes most of my students four lessons to get through this material, especially if they are young. If you’ve been teaching lessons a different way, I challenge you to try out this approach with your next student. If you are a beginning student and not a teacher, print out the music and try it on your own!

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