Step-by-Step Guide on How to Play Ohm
I give it a zero out of 10 difficulty rating which means it’s appropriate for you if you’ve never played guitar before and you just wanna learn how to play a song. You’re gonna have to learn one chord and one strumming pattern to play along with it.
And that’s basically it and then you’ll basically be able to play along with this song. So let’s jump in to it, let’s jump in to how to do this Before we do anything at all, I wanna make sure that you understand that the more familiar you are with this song, the easier it’s gonna be for you to approach. The trick is to be able to sing along with it. To memorize the lyrics, to hear it, to dance along with it.
To be very, very familiar with it in general. When I look back upon my life and I look back upon all the times that I’ve had to learn new things, like you know guitar pieces, I found that like the ones that I was really familiar with first like with my ears and like you know what’s happening in the songs in the tunes, the easier I learn them, the faster I learn them. So I would highly, highly recommend doing the same. You can do this by listening to the song like 3 or 4 times Again, dancing around memorizing the lyrics, etc.
I don’t wanna get too into it but that’s basically what you would have to do to get familiar with it. Now assuming that you are familiar with Ohm, let’s jump into the chord part first. Now you’re gonna have to learn how to play a D chord to play this song I’m gonna show you how to play it. It’s a little bit tricky for some beginners at first but it’s alright, I got your back let’s just jump into it.
So to play a D chord take your first finger, your pointer finger. Put it on the string, third closest to the floor on the second fret right about there. Okay Next, take your middle finger. Put it on the string closest to the floor, also on the second fret.
Finally take your ring finger put it on the string second closest to the floor on the third fret It should sound like this. Now, if you’re like many beginners when you’re playing this at first you probably are gonna hear something like that. And that’s actually okay if it’s the string that’s closest to the floor, that’s actually really, really normal for a lot of beginners, not everybody of course. But it’s very super normal and I wouldn’t recommend fretting about it.
Bad horrible pun. Okay, moving right along. So if you hear mutes, that’s okay it’s not the biggest deal but if you do hear buzzes and everything, chances are that your fingers are just not like close enough to the fret so you might wanna just kind of scoot these up a little bit. And you don’t necessarily have to press the strings down like a death grip whatever, anything, you can just simply just you can find the right placement and that actually doesn’t require all that much energy to do. So once again, this is your D chord.
And that’s the chord that you’re gonna be playing throughout this song. So let’s jump in to the strumming pattern and I’m gonna build this up very slowly, brick by brick fashion okay. So I’m gonna play a strum and then I want you to do the exact same thing I’m gonna take a little bit of a break after I do it. So that you can have a chance to do it.
So here we go I’m gonna start with a down strum. Your turn Okay, now we’re gonna do a down strum and an up strum. Your turn.
Okay, now we’re gonna do a down strum, up strum, down strum. Your turn Alright, now we’re gonna add something called an air strum or a ghost strum. It’s a strum that you kind of purposefully miss the strings. You know there’s no sound there obviously right. So it’s gonna go down, up, down, air strum like whiff the strings totally miss them. Actually wait a minute, down, up, down, up and then an air strum. Okay so one more time, down, up, down, up, whiff. Okay your turn.
All right next we’re gonna add another down strum after the actually no, we’re not gonna add a down strum, we’re gonna add an up strum. So this will probably be the most tricky one if you’re like brand new to guitar and everything. So just once again don’t forget that whiff strum it’s very, very important. So and your turn.
Okay here’s the next one, we’re gonna add a down strum. Okay your turn. And finally we’re gonna add an up strum. And your turn. Okay so there’s a couple of things that I’m doing on this strumming pattern that may help you out.
First things first, like whenever I get a strumming pattern down. I just try to get it into a loop necessarily like you kind of try to get it feeling very rhythmic on your own like this. And that’s basically what you need to do in order to play along with the song which is in my opinion kind of what your goal is. I mean to be able to play along with the song. So that’s one thing that’s going on that could help you. The other thing that I’m doing personally that might be of use for you is that I’m actually doing drop D tuning. And what that means is that like this string right here, this is by the way you know if you don’t know how to tune your guitar, there’s a tutorial that I put out called the easiest way to tune a guitar. I would actually recommend you check that video out and then come back to this part in this video because it’s gonna be really super helpful for you but in any event if you have checked out that video and everything and you know how to tune your guitar to standard tuning, this should make a whole lot more sense.
Now what I like to do is I like to use a tuner, like a different app altogether and there’s one tuner that I like a lot called Tuner Eclipse. It is an excellent, excellent app and it’s a chromatic tuner which means you don’t necessarily, you can pick the string that you wanna tune but I would actually recommend not picking a string at all and just saying like okay you wanna see a D so you wanna tune this string, the low E string down to a D So you would use the tuner and just like. And line it up with a D on the tuner It’s a little but weird to explain if you have really really good ears however what you could do is compare it to the D string which is like the string that’s third closest to the ceiling.
And if you’re already really familiar with the terminology of music, you just bring this D, make sure this D is like an octave lower than this D. That’s pretty much all there is to it. What this does is it makes it sound really rich and really full. So there’s that.
That’s another thing that you can do with this. But it’s not necessary. If you are gonna be playing a D chord perhaps is worth experimenting taking your thumb and putting it on the string closest to the ceiling. But that doesn’t work for everybody If your hand ends up like this, because your thumb is really small, don’t do that, ignore my advice okay. Don’t do it if it really messes with your wrist. Trust me that is not a road you wanna go down. Okay It’s something that I’ve experienced many times before and I don’t ever wanna experience ever again. And don’t wish on anybody.
So let’s see here, there’s one more thing that I actually wanted to show you Let’s say like most of this is like really super simple for you and you wanna soup it up a little bit. Okay you can add something, you can add a note with your pinky on the 4th fret of the G string at a specific point during the strumming pattern which is. Now this takes a lot of work for beginners like really brand new people. So like again just ignore this and save it for later if you will.
It’ll be a lot easier to approach down the road if you keep on playing guitar but if it’s just too hard right now just let it go but it happens on the very last down strum of the song. Down strum of the measure excuse me. Okay so that’s basically what’s going on with the song and you know if you can play along with this song, I can say that you pretty much have it If you’re looking for some tips on how to get better and how to practice this song however I will be including a link to my website where I have like a much more extensive troubleshooting section but to save time today I’m not gonna actually just go over it because I don’t know how many people are gonna be really interested in that.
