The previous blog posts covered a lot of interesting guitar techniques and ideas for you to explore. But now we come to a practical application of these techniques to play a popular song that you would certainly be familiar with. Keep reading to discover an easy way to play “Summer of ‘69” by Bryan Adams, on the guitar. The use of this song is purely for educational purposes, so you can quickly learn how to play along to your favourite songs.

The song is in the key of D, which is to say it uses notes from the D Major scale: D E F# G A B C# D

D Major Scale in Tablature (Tabs) Form

Playing the Song

While the actual song is played with a bit of distortion (a grittier sounding guitar) effect, it can be played on a clean electric or acoustic guitar, and it’s just as fun and legitimate. We’ll be using a mix of palm muting (or right-hand muting) which we’ve covered in one of the earlier lessons, along with open chords to get a more dynamic sound.

D Major Chord Riff – Introduction

D = Downstroke

PM = Palm mute

> = Accent (remove your palm from the strings to unmute them)

---- = Continue palm muting

One thing to note is that we’ll almost be ignoring the high E string, and instead focusing more on the D, G and B strings in this opening riff. Next, we switch to the A Major Chord as outlined below.

A Major Chord Riff – Introduction

After the intro bits, we shift from muted chords to nice big-sounding open chords. We’ll use a variation of the D Major, known as the D Suspended 2 (D sus2). All you need to do is remove the middle finger from the 1st string.

D Major: Index finger on the 2nd fret (3rd string), middle finger on the 2nd fret (1st string), ring finger on the 3rd fret (2nd string), and open string (4th string).

D sus2: Index finger on the 2nd fret (3rd string), ring finger on the 3rd fret (2nd string), and open strings (1st and 4th string).

Play one count of D sus2 and one count of D Major by adding back the middle finger on the 1st string. Similarly, we play the A sus2 and A Major in succession, after the D and D sus2.

A Major: Index finger on the 2nd fret (4th string), middle finger on the 2nd fret (3rd string), ring finger on the 2nd fret (2nd string), and open strings (1st and 5th).

A sus2: Index finger on the 2nd fret (4th string), middle finger on the 2nd fret (3rd string), and open strings (1st, 2nd and 5th).

This combination of A sus2 / A Major continues for the verse till the drum beat kicks in. Wasn’t that a really cool riff to learn? The rest of the song would be covered in the upcoming blog. For now, keep practising and perfecting this introduction piece, and once you’re comfortable with it proceed to the next blog post to complete your learning of “Summer of ‘69” by Bryan Adams.