Wake Me Up When September Ends Guitar Tutorial

Welcome to my Wake Me Up When September Ends Guitar Tutorial by Green Day. This is a beginner-intermediate song (depending on your perspective) and I try to make it as simple as possible, while still teaching you how to play it EXACTLY like the recording.

It’s broken down into 3 main parts: Acoustic, Electric and the Guitar solo. During the demonstration at the beginning, you can see how all of those parts can blend together, and one of my goals with this tutorial was to show you how rhythm and lead guitar work together. If you’re lucky enough to have people in your life who also play music, please take the time to work this one out and play along with someone else. If you don’t have this luxury, I think it’ll be really good for you to take advantage of various groups on the internet (forums, social media, etc) and seek out people near you who you can make music with. It’s a real shortcut to making you a better guitarist – a good guitarist 🙂

This song doesn’t use conventional chords, but the shapes are actually quite simple. There’s a lot to go over but if you follow the steps in this video, you’ll see how simple it really is. Please remember to take your time with it, learn each bit gradually and pay close attention to which strings I’m picking… that’s actually the toughest part.

If you find yourself having trouble with this tutorial, because it really is harder than your average beginner song, don’t get discouraged. It takes a lot of work to put something like this together, and with daily practice, you can definitely make it happen. You might need to scale it back and learn some easier tunes first (you can find a ton on my channel, so use it as a resource).

Either way, I hope you enjoy the lesson and look forward to teaching you again next week!

James