The Slap

The Slap

Before we kick off, Check out the full tab for the song in the Guitar Tabs section. This is essentially a loop with lots of musical layers on top of the core guitar part. In the Guitar Tabs section is the loop, which you repeat 8 times for the entire song.

Our first task is to get the slap technique up and running! This is a pretty simple concept but will take some serious getting used to. First up, let's take a look at the two ways to slap.

The final thing to remember is that we want to make sure the slap is always on the 2nd and 4th beats, like this:

Your first task is simply to explore this slapping technique, before moving on to the next lesson. Good luck!

Groove Time

With the basic slap idea on the table, we can now invest some time learning the main groove of this track. The good news is that once you have this groove together on a single chord, it remains consistent pretty much all the way through. So, we can use the first E major chord to establish the groove.

So, as you can see from the tab, the chord is broken up into individual notes, and then sealed with a slap. The way would count this is:

The count is based on a 16th note subdivision, as we are arpeggiating the chords using 16th notes. As we mentioned in the previous video, the key thing is that the slap is on the 2nd and 4th beats to act as a snare.

The First Theme

With the groove understood, let's now get down to the first part of the track. In the video, Thomas walks you through the chord movement and how the rhythm pattern stays consistent. Let's make sure that you have these chord shapes nice and clear. They can be found in the Chord Boxes section

These are the 4 chords we use in the opening section of the song, and they're pretty cool! The chord chart will look like this:

So, the first time you play through this set of chords, we use the exact fingerstyle pattern we were practising in the previous lesson. The second time, we push the Asus2. This simply means that rather than starting on the 3rd beat of the bar, it comes in just before, on the "2 and" beat, like this:

Your first task, therefore, is to get this section together. Take your time, get it on loop, and have some fun with it!

Section B

Time to move on to the second part of the song, which introduces more wonderful chords to learn. The structure of this section is:

There are a few new chord shapes here as well to learn, so it's important to get these committed to memory as you go through them. Try calling them out loud as you hit them to get them fixed in your brain!

The Asus2 and the Dsus2 at the end of each round is a "push", meaning it lands on the "2 and" beat. This is exactly the same as in the first section, it just happens more regularly here.

C Section

We're now in the final part of the song! The good news is that the C section very much uses the idea of the A section, with one lovely ending! It looks like this:

With that final section under our belts, we can go through the whole chord chart. Remember that this song loops this chord chart 6 times before the end of the track!

Focus on playing it at a slow pace, being sure that the slap starts to feel right! It'll take time, but add it to your daily practice sessions and you'll get there!