Guitartricks How to Play The Boys of Summer [Made Easy] (Don Henley) TUTORiAL

P2P | 23 May 2021 | 985 MB
Anders will show you how to play this song in a simple way, so you and other people can sing along and have some fun with it. He'll start with an easy way to adapt the intro riff. Then he'll show you how to adapt the bittersweet verse, upbeat chorus and breakdown.

In this tutorial I'm going to teach you how to play the iconic song "The Boys Of Summer" as made famous by Don Henley. It's always fun to dig into the studio version of a song like this and analyze all the intricate details in all the layers and layers of guitar parts. But sometimes you also just want to play the song in a simple way, so you and other people can sing along and have some fun with it. So that's what we'll be doing today.

First I'll show you a simple and easy way to adapt the intro riff to be played on solo acoustic guitar.

If you want to strengthen that a bit you can hum along with the melody. Then after that we're into the bittersweet sounding verse, and for that we'll strum the chords with a very quiet, but still intense, dynamic feel.

After that we're into the big upbeat chorus, which is the climax of the song, so for that section we'll really increase the dynamic intensity of our strumming.

After the 2nd chorus there's an instrumental breakdown/build and I'll also show you how to adapt this part to solo acoustic guitar. However, if that's too hard I'll also show a simpler alternative.

We'll also talk about how to get the strumming pattern solid enough to carry the tune on it's own, how to differentiate the different sections, how to change the sound of your acoustic guitar from where you strum and much more. The song is originally in the key of Eb, but for the sake of "acoustic convenience" we'll play it up a half step in the key of E minor. The vocals will be down an octave from the recording, where most people can sing, but if you want to raise the key you can always add a capo. The song features a super fast 8th note based groove in 4/4 and the quarter note equals 177 BPM. Let's get started!