Good Riddance Guitar Lesson

If you’re just getting started with your open chords, this song is a perfect introduction to Green Day!

It’s a nice mix of familiar chords and challenging strumming and picking patterns that can be very useful to learn.

The Intro

The instantly recognisable intro of this song is played over just one chord shape, an open G Major!

Holding on to this shape, you’ll want to play the E string twice. Then, move on to the open G string, and finish with the open D string!

This intro also makes for a great little exercise in playing without constantly looking at your picking hand, definitely a fun challenge!

We want this intro to sound quite dry, meaning we don’t want any sustain on these notes. To achieve that, we’ll mute the strings right after playing them.

To mute the strings, I’m using my picking hand. I just put the palm of my hand on the strings, easy! Think of your right hand as an “On Off switch”!

Play this twice, and you’ve got the intro!

The Verse

To play the verse, we’ll need three different open chords. We’ll need G, Cadd9 and D.

Something to keep in mind is that the Cadd9 shape we’re going for is very similar to the G major chord shape we’ve seen before.

When playing G major and transitioning to Cadd9, all you have to do is to move fingers 1 and 2 up a string!

Also, the transition between Cadd9 and D major can be simplified a bit as you don’t have to move your ring finger. In fact, your third finger doesn’t move at all throughout this progression!

The structure of the verse looks like this:

Let’s talk about the rhythm of the verse. It’s a nice mix between picking and strumming.

The picking pattern is very consistent:

We play the root of the chord twice, jump to the B string, G string, D string and back to the G string.

As the root note of these three chords is different, you have to change the first note of this pattern for each chord you’re playing.

On Cadd9, we want to start playing this pattern from the A string on, and on D major, start from the D string!

The good new is, the rest of the pattern stays the same!

Try to make sure you’re following this pattern as you’re picking the strings:

Basically, what I want you to do is to follow this pattern by focusing on individual strings instead of full strums.

Even if you occasionally pick a “wrong” string, holding a full chord shape means it will still sound good and musical!

The Pre-Chorus

The chords we need to play the pre-chorus are E minor, D, Cadd9 and G.

Most of them we’ve used on this song already, so let’s look at E minor:

The structure of the pre-chorus looks like this:

More good news! The pattern is exactly the same as in verse. Again, all we have to do is to make sure we’re targeting the right root note on the first two downstrokes.

Since the root note of E minor is the open E string, you’d start the pattern from that string on!

The Chorus

On the chorus, we'll only need Em, G and D.

Let’s look at the structure of this chorus:

And again, on this section of the song, we’re using the same pattern here too!

After the D major, we just jump back to the verse again.

On the first chorus, even if we’re playing the same pattern as before, try and start strumming a bit more. Add dynamics and energy to this part!

Essentially, we want to slowly transition to an actual strumming pattern instead of a picking pattern.

Think of this strumming pattern as something that is kind of the essence of the rhythm of this song, but we’re sometimes being very precise with it, picking precise strings, and we’re sometimes strumming the more traditional way.

Changing the strumming pattern

On the second part of the song, we want to strum a lot more. It’s more energetic section, with different dynamics.

That means the strumming pattern is going to change a bit, but the structure of the song is still the same!

The pattern is now played over two bars, it’s more complex and a lot richer than the pattern we’ve seen before.

Just remember that if it feels like too much, you can always stick with the previous pattern we learned. Take it step by step!

Let’s have a look at the new pattern:

Now, let’s try to apply this pattern to the verse of the song.

Since this new pattern is built over 8 beats (two bars), you’d play this pattern once on G major because we’re staying on G major for two bars. But then, you’d have to split this pattern over Cadd9 and D Major.

When going from Cadd9 to D major, we want to “push” D Major, meaning we’re going to play it slightly before beat 1 of its bar.

Do be more precise, D major is played on the “and” of beat 4 of the previous bar.

For the rest of the song, we’re going to keep the same pattern, with the same push on the same spot on the pattern. We just apply this pattern to the part of the song we’re playing!

Doing this little push definitely adds some colour, so you could even emphasise it if you like!

Remember to listen to the song or to go back to the video to make sure these patterns are matching up.

This song is a great way to develop a more precise strumming for other future songs you’ll add to repertoire!