Now that I have learned ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ I am moving on to ‘Call me Maybe?’ by Carly Ray Jepson. While most of the chords are the same ‘Call me Maybe’ adds an E minor (EM) which makes it slightly more difficult to play. My first step in learning how to play ‘Call me Maybe’ is learning how to play the EM chord. The EM chord is made by putting your middle and ring finger on the G and B chord and playing all of the strings. Below is a picture of the fingering for this chord.
After learning the EM chord in isolation I played it along with the other chords in the song to get used to switching between the Em, D, G, and C chords. I think that playing the chords before you learn a song is a really valuable learning step to help develop an understanding of the chord’s sound. below I have a video of myself playing with the different chords.
Next, I looked at a guitar cover of Call me maybe to get an idea of how it should sound.
This video helped better explain how to play and strum call me maybe. This video introduced me to the idea of ‘bouncing’ where you quickly put your fingers up and down on a chord to practice forming it quickly.
After practicing the chords I attempted to play the chords to call me maybe along with the song.
Wow! Call me maybe is a lot harder than Sweet Home Alabama. I noticed that I really have to work on the G-D-D and G-C-C part of the chorus, I also have to work on forming my C’s faster. Below is a recording of me practicing the chorus.
I think isolating this difficult section will help me play the song more consistently!
Featured Photo by Jim Reardan on Unsplash