Easy Guitar Songs – Losing my Religion

As a beginning guitarist, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with talk of scales, chords, progressions and so on. We could talk theory until your eyes glaze over. But while some basic theory knowledge is necessary to get you going as a beginning guitarist, the best way to get better is to actually play your guitar (revolutionary concept, isn’t it, haha).

So with that in mind, I want to give you some examples of songs to play that are easy enough for a beginner to manage with a little practice so you can feel like you’ve had some fun and accomplished something.

Hopefully, this will help keep your enthusiasm high while you learn all the other stuff. The song I’ve chosen for today is Losing my Religion by REM. While this is a bit of an older song, it’s a classic by a great band, and it’s not too tough to learn.

You can find the chords and some tab here: http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/r/rem/losing_my_religion_ver3_tab.htm

Here’s a link to a live version the song live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_XFMCgeI7c

First of all, just listen to the song through once to get a feel for it.

The intro contains the same chords as the chorus. There is some tab for the lead part but you don’t need to worry about this at first, you can just begin by strumming the chords after the opening couple of notes.

Verse

The verse is based around two chords, Am and Em. You play two bars of Am, then 2 bars of Em, repeating this pattern 3 times, but the third time you play one bar of Dm instead of a second bar of Em. Then the whole pattern is repeated before you move on to the chorus.

Chorus

The chorus begins with two bars of G, a bar of F, then a quick change from G to Am on the words “heard you sing”. The second part of the chorus has a bar of F followed by 2 beats of G, two beats of Am and a bar of G which leads back to the verse.

Bridge

The bridge contains some lead parts with a bit of a tricky rhythm, but the notes are easy and almost all on the high E string. You play three eight notes at the 12th fret, followed by 5 at the 10th, 3 at the 8th fret, and then 5 at the 5th fret and repeat. These notes are played over one bar sections of the C and Am chords.

The song finishes with a half verse, a final chorus and then an 8 bar eighth note riff to close the song.

Strum along with the video if you can to help you get a sense of when the chord changes come and even give the lead riffs a try if you like, they’re surprisingly easy for something that sounds so good.