Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher

Category: Music

Tags: neil young guitarlearn guitarheart of gold guitarplay guitarguitar tutorialheart of goldsecret guitar teacherclassic rockneil youngnick minnionsecretguitarteacherclassic riffsacoustic guitar

Description: Learn the classic guitar parts of Neil Young’s 1972 hit, Heart of Gold. Download the tab for this song at secretguitarteacher.com/short-lessons/secrets-unlocked Sign up for a free trial and access hundreds more videos, lessons and guitar exercises! -- Abridged Script I often think of Neil Young as the guy who taught me how to play rhythm on the acoustic guitar. I remember spending hours working on this song back in 1972 when it first came out, trying to get the exact sound I heard him play on the record. The intro chords are nice and simple – Em7 that’s an Em with the D note added using the pinky at fret 3 on the 2nd string and D. While we’re looking at this hand, notice the staccato muting technique with my fingers punching in the chord as I hit it, but relaxing between each strum to cut off the sound of the chords. The strumming hand also helps a little with the muting action. You can see I am keeping the palm of the hand in close the pick is well-choked – just a little of it protruding from the thumb and finger playing with fairly short sharp down-strokes. The first two strokes hit the muted 6th string to emulate the bass guitar and drum sound from the record and this is followed by concentration on the middle four strings on the Em7 chord then the top four on the D chord and back to the middle as we change to the Em. Next we have a little hammer-on lick. Notice that we play this by simply lifting the chord shape off and on a couple of times. For lovers of detail though, make sure you hammer-on the first time, but pick the note the second time so, in slow motion. This uses all down strokes. Next, we play the part behind the harmonica solo. Two beats on Em and two on C followed by two beats on D and two on G. All played three times through before repeating the intro riff Em7, D, Em. Then we play the verse, which starts with three times through the Em, C, D, G - same as we have just played at the start of the Harp solo. Then a whole bar of Em followed by a whole bar of G then a bar of C followed by a bar in which we start on C but then link to G via a bass run like this… Then the Harmonica instrumental link is repeated exactly as at the start of the song and we continue with verse 2 played exactly as we played verse 1. Then the harmonica instrumental kicks in again, but this time we switch to a vocal outro after bar 6 and play through the chords Em, D, Em three times before ending the song with the last four bars of the verse. So, once you have the distinctive rhythmic feel of this song down, you can see that it is not a difficult song to play. Site members can access a printout of the full chord sequence from the link near the video screen and, once you have played through this a couple of times, I advise playing along to the record to pick up more of the detail of the rhythm from the great man himself.