Brown Eyed Girl

The Verse Chords

The whole song is rooted in the key of G major, and rolls through a simple progression of major chords, only interrupted by a single minor chord in the chorus. The major chords in the verse are | G | C | G | D | which is a | I | IV | I | V | chord progression (1, 4, 1, 5 if you're not hot on Roman Numerals).

This is of course and absolute classic progression, shared by hundreds, if not thousands of other songs, but Brown Eyed Girl is certainly one of the most famous of this style of progression.

We will be playing these chords in their open positions, which are shown here:

As for how we strum through these chords, we will be using our universal strumming pattern, which I'm sure you have all played a lot of before! If not, the pattern itself looks like this:

Now when it comes to playing this strumming pattern and changing the chords, as a beginner guitarist that can be quite overwhelming. I want you to remember that we are not looking for perfection here. We are simply looking for you to do your best to keep that strumming hand moving and staying in time, whilst the chords loosely sound ok! Your attention should be more on the rhythm than getting a perfect chord, as I explained in the video.

It would make sense, therefore, to divide the practice into two parts. On one side, focus on the strumming, not concerning yourself too much with how the chords are sounding, just do your best to change the shape whilst staying in time. On the other side, change the chords without the strumming, focusing on getting as clean a sound as you can.

The Bridge Chords

The next section we can call the bridge, which rolls through the chords | C | D | G | Em | C | D | G | D | - So on top of our major 1, 4, 5 chords, we now have the 6th chord from the key of G major, which is also known as the relative minor. Here are those chords in sequence for you:\

Something to be aware of, is that there are two styles of bridge in this song. The first is as shown above, which is the first bridge that leads into the verse again. The second style, however, is an elongated version that leads into the chorus. You know the part, where Van the Man sings "Do you remember when, we used to sing…". It's too classic! That part elongates the D at the end and we can switch to a D7 chord. That looks like this: | C | D | G | Em | C | D | G | D | D7 | D7 | - So we have two extra bars of the D7 chords. It looks like this:

The Chorus

Next up we have the chorus, but this is easy peasy, as it's exactly the same as the verse. We have the progression of | G | C | G | D | all the way through, with exactly the same strumming pattern. As shown here:

With the dynamics in this section, we want to basically hit a little harder! The strumming pattern is based on the same vibe as the verse, but now we can add a few more strums, or hit the strings harder… Anything that brings a little more energy now to the track!

The Intro Riff

Even though this section is right at the beginning of the track, I've left it to the end of the song as it's certainly a step up from the open chords. However, as we also encourage here at the Guitar Club, do give it a go! Know that it's harder, know that it's a challenge, and give it a try! Who knows, maybe this will feel easier to you than the chords at this moment.

As I suggest in the video, we don't need to go into too much detail here as that is unnecessary at a beginner level, but essentially we are playing a riff based around each chord, using little Diads (two note chords) across the neck. Let me do my best to try and walk you through it in concept. We start with a G major triad, like this:

At that, point in the progression (the second bar) we move to the C major chord, which is played like this:

We then come back to the G again to repeat the exact same as the first bar. For the fourth bar we move to the D major chord, which we play like this:

As I said, please do not concern yourself too much with this if you are a beginner and this all seems a little complicated. One day, after working through our pathways and course, this will all make complete sense to you! For now, absorb what resonates, discard what doesn't and just enjoy trying to play the part.