House of the Rising Sun

Lesson Goals:

♦ Review the Am chord
♦ Learn to play chords using single note picking
♦ Play House of the Rising Sun

In a recent lesson we discussed the fact that numerous hit songs have been written using only three or four chords. This classic hit from "The Animals", which consists of five chords, should prove 2 points:

1. All rules in music are made to be broken

2. In music, there are no rules!

Take a look at the chart below. These are all chords you should already know, including the Am that you learned in the last lesson.

This song is to be played using single note picking on each of the chords and you can use down picking strokes on all of them.

Prior to working on the single note picking you may want to just strum each chord and get used to making the chord changes with your left hand.

This song is in 6/8 time which means that there are 6 beats to every measure and every eighth note gets a beat. You can verbalize the picking pattern by simply counting from one to six and placing a slight emphasis on the "one" and "four" beats like this:

"one, two, three, four, five, six"

Now, let's try playing it!