Chords for I Got A Name - Guitar Lesson Preview

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [A] _ _ _
[E] _ _ [A] _ _ _ [E] _ _ _
_ _ [C#m] _ _ _ _ _ _
[A] _ _ [B] _ _ _ _ [F#] _ _
_ _ [E] _ _ _ _ We're going to take a look at one of my all-time [N] favorite songs, Jim Croce.
Actually, a lot of Jim Croce songs are my favorites.
Love the guy and his songs.
Now this is a course I got a name.
Now Jim didn't write this.
This was written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, but Jim, it was like the perfect song for him.
Great story, great delivery, and unfortunately, it was pretty much, well, the end of his career
as he died shortly after this became, well, right around the time this album came out,
unfortunately.
So what we're going to do is take a look at a [G] bunch of different things in this lesson. _
What I played right there was Maury's guitar part.
Maury did the finger picking in this, and Jim really just strummed the chords.
And if you look at live videos of it, [N] he doesn't even play the first verse.
And he plays it, of course, in a different key.
So Jim plays it with [E] the guitar open, or not capoed, in the key of E.
[F] We'll talk about the chords that he uses [N] there.
And then Maury is capoed at the second fret, playing it thinking in the key of D, a whole
step higher, so he plays a whole step lower.
Then there's, [E] of course, a cool lead.
Let me show you.
It's going to be_ _ _ _ _ _
Anyway, [N] we'll take a look at the lead too.
I got all that stuff tabbed out for us here and a chart.
So first we'll talk about the chords.
Very simple strumming, so there's nothing really elaborate going to be going on in that.
We'll just take a look at the chart and strum through it, Jim's part.
One thing when we're playing songs in the key of E, a lot of bar chords.
And that usually includes a B chord, but in Jim's case, he never plays it this way.
He always plays the B out of the E family and just comes up to the seventh fret.
We'll talk about that in the next segment.
_ So be ready to play some bar chords _ only up to the seventh fret, and every other one will
be lower than that.
So review your chords in the key of [D] E, and then we're going to have a couple of secondary
dominant chords as well.
[D] But coming up in the next segment, we'll talk about Jim's part, and then we'll break down
the rest of the song.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
What we have in I Got a Name is, as I mentioned in the last segment, chords all in the key
of E, and that's going to include pretty much all of them played as bars, except the [E] E chord.
So the E we're going to play is a standard open E chord, and then chord five in E [D] is B7.
We're going to see that a lot, and we're going to play it a couple of different ways.
We might even play it [E] three different ways, depending on what you want to do.
But B7 is one of the few [B] B chords that can be played open, so our standard B7 chord would
be B, D sharp, A, and F sharp up on the top.
And that's [F#] usually how we're going to start the song, is going from an open E to an open [B] B7.
Then we start our bar chords.
So now what we need is bars out of the E family and the A family, and we're going to see majors,
minors, and sevens.
So of course, anything out of the E family that would be a [D] seventh chord would be played
in this shape.
So we're going to see the E7 shape down at the second fret, giving us F [N] sharp seven. _ _ _ _ _
The strumming is very simple to this.
We really just want to keep a steady down, down, up, down, down, up kind of thing going,
where we hear clear [Bm] accents on beats one and [E] three.
One, two, three, four.
One _ _ [F#] two and three, and really [D] light on four.
[E] So down, down, up, down, hit that one hard, and then very [C#] lightly on four, because we're
about to change chords.
Most of the time the chords change [D#] one measure at a time.
So if we take a look at the chart and the progression, [F] what we're going to do, the verse
[E] starts off with E, _ _
[B] B7, for C sharp [C#m] minor. _ _ _
_ _ _ Let's take a [N] short look at the lead.
This might seem a little confusing, because the lead is done with a guitar that is capoed
at the second fret, because Morrie is playing this.
And he of course does his finger picking with a thumb pick, and that then, he uses that
pick, the thumb pick, to play his leads with.
So there's a couple different ways you could approach this.
You could of course play it with your fingers, but also you could pick up the pick and play it.
Now, when we talk about the fret numbers, they're all with respect to the capo.
So when it says seven, I'm [G] coming to the seventh fret [G#m] from the capo.
So [F#m] now I'm thinking of this as the first, third, fifth, and seventh, [G] as far as my dots
are concerned on this guitar.
That's why I broke this guitar out.
Good excuse [G#] to break out the Santa Cruz guitar.
That has some fret markers on it.
_ [G#m] So as long as I get oriented that this is [E] seven, and I'm thinking of this as notes out
of a D chord, my D scale.
[F#] _ _ [C#] _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ [E] _ _ [F#] Open [G#] two and four on the fourth string, open two and [C#m] four on the third string, and [Em] then
_ to the [F#] third, fifth, and seventh are the notes I expect [E] to see _ on the [F#] second string, which
would be D, E, and F sharp, G at the eighth, [Em] and A at the tenth. _
_ So those are the notes we're going to see most of the time.
Now Morrie also bends to a lot of [F#] notes.
So if we [G#] take a look at the tab, this is only an approximation of what's happening here,
but that lead opens up with the F sharp at the seventh fret, _ [F#] and up to the tenth fret,
_ _ _ and it's kind of following the melody. _
_ _ _ _ _ So our bend at the tenth, at the eighth. _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _