Hurt Guitar Tutorial

Welcome to my Hurt Guitar Tutorial by Johnny Cash. We will learn the easy flatpicking pattern, easy chord shapes, chords & lyrics and everything else you need to play it. This song is great for beginners who are looking to improve their technique, as it features some basic chords with a bit of a twist. The rhythm is also broken into picking and strumming, so it’s a bit different than your regular “strummer.”

Hurt Chords: the song primarily uses the C, D and Am chords (for the most part) and then later, in the chorus, we use Am7, Fadd9, C and G. These chords symbols seem a bit intimidating, but it’s really just the plain old campfire chords with 1 finger added to a couple of them. We go over some chord switching tips that show you how to easily switch between these shapes.

After that, we go over the picking pattern. It’s really straight-forward, but lends this tune a unique feel. And the strumming pattern used over the chorus is comprised entirely of downstrokes, so we take the opportunity to talk more about the “feel” of it, since the technical motions are so simple.

Putting it all together isn’t so bad, and the song is played at a nice slow pace, so I’m sure, even if you’re fairly new to guitar, you’ll get this one together pretty darn quick!

Enjoy the lesson! See you next week!

James