When We Were Young - Adele

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Hey everyone! In this tutorial, we’re going to show you the easiest possible way to play “When We Were Young” by Adele. This song requires a capo on the 3rd fret. Without that, this song goes from “easy-ish” to “quite difficult” as it would be mostly barre chords (and not even the simple barre chords, but a whole bunch of odd shapes). This simplifies it a lot and makes it accessible to the average guitarist.

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Throughout the lesson I mention our eBook, covering all the fundamentals of rhythm guitar. It’s free to all of our subscribers. You can find it here: https://goodguitarist.com/learn-rhythm-guitar/

Intro sung by the incredible Carmina Bolinao – follow her here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/alacarmina
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This song is easy in its construction – just some chords and a strumming pattern. What makes it challenging is remembering the order of the chords (since there are so many shapes!). We start out with the verse, which uses 6 chords and 2 variations on those chords. After working out some ways to get through them, we practice chord switching. This is followed by a strumming pattern which, when combined with the chords, gives us the verse.

After practicing the verse together, slower than the recording, we move on to the pre-chorus, chorus and bridge. Along the way we learn a couple more chord shapes and talk about some ways to switch through them more easily.

By the end of this, with a little bit of patience and concentration, you should be able to play this song from start to finish!

Enjoy!
James