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This song is a beautiful guitar ballad, and there are loads of exciting things going on here. You might already know that Neil Young is one of my favorite artists. He's a seriously talented guitar player and songwriter.
Harvest Moon has to be one of my favorite NY ballads! It's lovely to play and great for learning the play the bass out separately on your guitar. In this lesson, I'll do some close-ups and explain what's going on with the fretting hand.
🎶 Harvest Moon is a great tune for Grade 6+ guitar players. You'll put into practice many of your guitar skills when learning this acoustic song. :)
Now, grab your guitar & let's get stuck in.
To play this tune, you'll need a couple of chords, including D, Dmaj, and there's a G6 chord in there.
To follow Young's version, you'll play it in Drop D tuning. Tune your thickest string down to the D note using your fourth string as a reference. Playing that thicker string down will give a nicer and bigger sound to your D chord!
On the original recording, there's a little riff with 12/12 seven harmonics all the way through. This will be tricky to do - give the tune a listen to understand what's going on before tackling this. Explore it if you're up for a challenge!
You'll also want to learn the fingering for the fretting hand. If you've got a bit of experience as a guitar player, try to get it in your head and make it sound just like you think it should. It'll put into practice your ear training.
🎵 Allow your body the freedom to find it. It most likely will if you've got a good rhythm technique in your strumming hands.
The get the strumming nice, you need just the right amount of hard strums and soft strums. You'll need to accent the right notes, which can take a bit of practice.
A big part of Neil Young's playing style is consistency with his strumming hand. He picks out the right notes and accents within the strum. This will be extra tricky for the intro - so take your time and ease into it!
For the intro, you'll play consistent eight notes and accent some more than others. To get the same sound - you'll need to be hitting the bass string and sometimes the treble strings with a light brush.
🚨 To nail the strumming, listening to the original recording is your way to go!
Check out the original
Have you learned a song from one of Justin's tutorials? :) Share a video of you playing it! We cannot wait to see your progress and enthusiasm. :)