Blackbird Guitar Lesson - The Beatles

Genre: Folk

Difficulty level: intermediate

Guitar techniques you will learn in this lesson:

• fingerpicking
• guitar chords
• drone
• rhythm

Blackbird is a great song to practice your finger picking with. It looks complicated at first, but if you get the hang of the patterns, it’s not that difficult. There are 2 main fingerpicking patterns that repeat throughout the song, so if you practice those and get them down, you should be playing this song perfectly. Even though, don’t expect to be playing this song in 1 day, but you will be playing it, I promise you :-).

Blackbird is played in the key of G, and also uses a G drone (open G string) throughout the song as well. You’ll learn all about drones in this guitar lesson. The timing of the song varies between 2/4, 3 /3 and 4/4, so you’ll be learning timing and rhythm with this song as well. 

All in all, Blackbird is not the easiest beginner guitar lesson you will learn on our site, but it will give you a chance to really improve you fingerpicking technique and timing, which is vital for any guitar player. Even if you don’t like the genre, fingerpicking is a must know guitar skill, that you have to learn.

Song Details

Blackbird was released in 1968 by The Beatles on their self titled album, The Beatles. The song was written by Paul McCarthy, and was inspired by racial tension escalating at that time in the U.S. The guitar parts of the songs were actually inspired by Bach’s Bourrée in E minor.

Loads and loads of musical artists have covered this song, or have used elements of it since its release, including The Grateful Dead, John Denver, Savage Garden, etc.