Your First Song
Step 6 of 10 · Beginner Guitar Path
Put your chords and strum together on a real public-domain song.
What you'll learn
- Change between chords in time over a full song
- Loop a progression and build it up to tempo
- Find more chord-charted songs in the songbook
This is the payoff: put a couple of chords and your new strum together and play an actual song. The trick is to pick something with just two or three chords so your hands can focus on the changes instead of memorising a long chart.
Choose a slow, familiar tune from the public-domain songbook — everything there is free to play, chord-charted, and copyright-free. Read the chart top to bottom, then loop the chord changes on their own, without singing, until you can switch shapes in time. Keep the strum simple (steady down-strums are perfectly fine) and play at whatever tempo lets you change cleanly.
When the changes feel smooth, nudge the speed up and add the words. Stuck on one change in particular? Isolate just those two chords and drill them with a guided practice routine. Play a whole song from start to finish and you have officially crossed the beginner threshold.
Practice this