Saturday, February 28, 2009

How to play "The River" by Bruce Springsteen on acoustic guitar

For today's lession, we're going to learn how to play The River by Bruce Springsteen. This song was the title track of his fifth album, The River, and was released in 1981. This is a great song, one of the Boss's classics. It's also a nice song to play on acoustic guitar, and not as hard to play as you might think, as we'll see in a few minutes. If you are a harmonica player, it has a great harmonica introduction and solo as well, although for this lesson we'll just stick to the acoustic guitar piece.

The River is usually played in the key of G, and uses five main chords: the familiar chord progression of G, C, and D, with Em and Am thrown in for good measure. In the key of G, Em and Am are relative minor chords to G and C, respectively.

In my opinion, singing this song is much more challenging than playing it. The melody has a range of several octaves, and, since I don't have the same pipes as the Boss, I have to capo the guitar at the 6th fret to pull it off, thereby playing and singing it in the key of C#. Here is what it sounds like when I play it:



Enjoy!

2 comments:

  1. hi,
    so nice. this site is so helpful to all.
    guitar tab

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  2. Maybe you can put some chords so that while visitors watch your video they can also do the same with the chors?

    Guitar Shop

    ReplyDelete