I Love Rock ’N Roll

If you’re getting into power chords and high energy strumming, this could be a perfect song for you to learn!

The Intro

On the intro, we’re going to need three chords: E5, A5 and B5. These three chords are power chords, and if you’re just getting into power chords, don’t worry! Two of them are played in an open position, meaning you don’t have to barre.

You may notice we have two different E5 positions, we’ll need the other E5 later on! Something important here is to think about how long you want each chord to ring out. In this specific song, we want the chords to be strummed and muted straight after we’ve strummed them. Don’t let them ring!

Let’s break the intro down bar by bar: on the first bar, we only play E5 (the open position), and the pattern looks like this:

We also have a bend fret 3 on the E string on the “e” of beat 4. And if you struggle with the placement of it, hit the strings on beat 4 with a muted downstroke, that will help you time the bend, which would occur on the upstroke right after that beat 4.

On the second bar, we have the same pattern, but this time played over A5 and B5 (so two beats on each chord) with the same bend we’ve seen on the “e” of beat 4 again.

The third bar of the intro is the same as the first bar we’ve seen, with E5 and the same pattern again. The fourth bar is where things change a bit, as we have a bar in 3/4, meaning we only have three beats! On that fourth bar, we play A5, B5, then back to A5. As we only have three beats, the pattern will look different:

As you can see, the transition between B5 and A5 can be challenging as they’re played back to back, so take your time with this, and try to minimise your movements by playing A5 with the index finger, which should already be on the right fret following B5!

We’ve got a couple of bars left to look at. On the first one, we’re playing E5 (open) and we’re strumming on “1” and the “and” of 1:

In the last bar of the intro, we’re playing E5 again, but this time, try to use the second option we’ve seen! The pattern is the same as the one we’ve seen just before, but we’ve got a lick to play on shape 1 of the E minor pentatonic scale.

The structure of what we’ve seen so far would then look like this:

The Chorus

Great news! The chorus is exactly the same as the intro, but we don’t play the bend after A5. We only play the bend after the E5!

The Verse

More good news, we don’t have any new chords to learn in order to play the verse! The structure is different, so let’s start with that:

Let’s now add some details to that verse. First of all, the main pattern that we follow is a pattern we’ve seen in the intro, where we strum two downstrokes on the first two 8th notes of the bar:

We’re going to play that pattern on the first four bars of the verse, but on the fifth bar, we’re going to strum A5 and B5 following the pattern below, with A5 played on the first two downstrokes, and B5 played on the two following downstrokes

The sixth bar of the verse is again a shorter bar than what we’d expect, as we’re in a 2/4 time signature again, meaning we have 2 beats instead of 4. The pattern would then look like this:

We then have a very long A5 that we’re going to strum only once, just let it ring for as long as you can! They do it for approximately 2 bars on the original song, but feel free to play around with that. To finish, we have a B5 where we play all the downstrokes harder and harder to increase the dynamics of the end of the verse.

Of course we also have to play the lick that we’ve seen on the intro. When you see a chord in a purple colour on the structure above, that means you want to play the lick at the end of the bar!

The Solo

Let’s now dive into the solo of I Love Rock ’N Roll! The solo is in the key of E Major, which is not to be confused with the key of the lick we played earlier which was in E minor. Most of it is played on the E Major pentatonic scale, but we also have a minor 3rd right at the beginning of the solo and a couple of notes from the E Major scale.

On top of that, we also have a chord to play, E7! We have a couple of options here, feel free to choose the one you like the most.

In Conclusion

I Love Rock ’N Roll is a classic, with lots of little details to get right, such as the “short” bars and the challenging solo, but this is a very fun song to play with lots of things to learn from!