Easy Guitar Songs to Play for Beginners

It's indeed a very easy song for beginners. It uses only four chords: Em - C - G - D/F# throughout the entire vocal and almost all instrumental lines. The D/F# chord is a D major chord with the F note as its bass. Here is a simplified version played using only four strings:

    D/F#
e|---2---|  (middle finger)
B|---3---|  (ring finger)
G|---2---|  (index finger)
D|---4---|  (pinky finger)
A|---x---|
E|---x---|

Somewhere in the instrumental part, only two chords—Em and C— are repeated several times. The strumming in this composition is really slow.

A 3-chord song: D - C - G

To get straight to the chords, follow the link above that opens in a new tab, scroll down through the guitar tab there, and you'll see the chords alongside the lyrics.

Note that in the chorus, the chords are switched at the end of each lyric line.

            G
.............
            D
.............
            F
.............
            C
.............

The original song was recorded in a key that requires the use of bar chords. Here is a transposed and slightly modified version of this song, consisting only of easy-to-play open chords.

A couple of slow downward strums per chord go well with this tune; this helps to mitigate too much focus on the strumming hand while working out smooth chord changes.

For a more interesting sounding version, you can substitute the G - Em - C - D chords with the slightly modified ones:

If you prefer to use arpeggios instead of strumming, here is a pretty good guitar tablature for this tune.

One of the easiest songs to play, the verse and the chorus are played with just two different chords for each part:

Em ------ 
   ||||||
   |**|||
   ||||||

D6/9 ------
     ||||||
     *||*||
     ||||||

Em9 ------
    ||||||
    |*|||*
    ||||||

Dmaj9 ------
      ||||||
      |||**|
      ||||||

Here is a very good video lesson that includes an explanation of how to strum a shuffle rhythm, which is better suited here.

At first, playing this song might not seem as straightforward as the chord layout suggests. For example, in verse 2, the 3rd line contains four chords, while the other lines contain only two. This means that the duration of each chord in the 3rd line is half that of the chords in the other lines.

Time diagram for the verse:

1st line: G  -   -   -   Cadd9  -   -   -   |
2nd line: G  -   -   -   Cadd9  -   -   -   |
3rd line: G  -  Cadd9  -   G  -  Cadd9  -   |
4th line: D  -   -   -   - C    -   -   -   |

Just listen to the song for some time; it's really a snap to get used to the changes.

Click here for the fingerstyle version of this song. It may erroneously seem from the provided tab that each note lasts the same amount of time, but to make it sound right, play the note at the beginning of each bar twice as long as the other notes.

Here goes the missing intro:

e--------0-3-2--------3-2-----
B--0-3-0--------0-3-0-----3---
G-----------------------------
D-----------------------------
A-----------------------------
E-----------------------------
	

When played with strumming, this song uses a couple of bar chords: Bm and F#m. However, if you use the fingerstyle technique, as shown in the provided tab, you won't play chords. Instead, you'll use a simple fingerstyle pattern that requires a maximum of two strings to be pressed simultaneously. Here are the lyrics for the song.

This song features the C9 chord, which has some jazzy feel to it and is less frequently used in rock and pop music. It can also be conveniently played as an open-position chord:

Slow strumming makes this song quite easy to play.

If you feel like you are up to playing it with slightly more complicated chords and want to make your accompaniment sound more interesting, here is another version for you.

Except in the bridge, there are only three chords that repeat throughout the entire theme. However, the chord progression feels slightly "unequal" compared to the other songs though:

D - Am x2 - Em

It took me some time to get used to playing the Am chord twice in the middle of it.

There's no Fmaj7 chord in my "open position chord chart" (this chord is used in the bridge of the song), here it is:

Another song where only three open-position chords are used: D, G, and Asus4.

It is a very simple song, with the same sequence of chords repeating over and over, although the switching between the chords in the middle of the riff (G to D to Asus4) might be a bit fast for a complete beginner.

You might substitute the G chord in the intro and the verse with G/E. It is the same G major chord, but with the E note as the bass:

This way, it sounds more suitable.

The progression for the intro/verse would then be:

In the second part of the song, there is an instrumental line that is repeated four times: Em7 - C - D - Bm.

The Bm chord, when played normally, is a bar chord. What you could do to make it easier to play is replace it with a simplified version that has D as its bass note, turning it into the Bm/D chord, which requires only four strings to play but still sounds well there. Here it is:

This song is built upon a very beautiful (finger)picking arrangement. If you have a chorus guitar effect, add it to the clean sound along with some reverb or delay, it will make magic.

In the chorus, instead of the chords provided on the song's page (Em - C - D - G·Fm), you can use the following power chords (as in the original recording), playing them either with fingerpicking or a plectrum. Power chords are much easier to play:

     E5        C5        D5        G5   F#5 
e|----------------------------------------------|
B|----------------------------------------------|
G|----------------------------------------------|
D|---2---9-----5---5-----7---7------------------|
A|---2---7-----3---3-----5---5-----5-5---4-4----|
E|---0-----------------------------3-3---2-2----|