Live Forever Guitar Lesson

If, just like Liam Gallagher, you “just want to fly”, this iconic track is perfect for you! This beginner-friendly song is one of my favourite Oasis tracks to play and teach. It’s a great blend of big open chords and some more challenging rhythm work!

The Verse

After the very recognisable drum intro, we start with the first verse of the song. To play the verse, we’re going to need four chords, G, D, A minor and C.

We’ll be using open chords, and they look like this:

The structure is pretty straightforward and looks like this:

Try to get used to that structure slowly, playing each chord once, and keeping your strumming hand moving down on each 8th notes. That way, jumping to the pattern later on will feel a lot more natural and comfortable.

When it comes to transitions between chords, something to keep in mind is that you don’t have to move your third finger when going from G major to D major. Then, you can keep your index finger down when switching between A minor and C major.

Always try to simplify transitions wherever you can, just like we did here!

Now, let’s look at the strumming pattern. One thing to understand is that there’s so much going on the track that it’s actually quite hard to know precisely which guitar is playing what!

The one I like to play on that song would look like this:

Since this pattern is played over 4 beats (a whole bar), you just have to play it once on G, once on D, and once on A minor.

In the last bar of this verse, since we’re playing C and D in the same bar, we’ll have to “split” this pattern between these two chords.

As I always say, don’t try to teleport your fingers from C to D on beat 3 straight away. At this speed, and while playing this pattern, you’ll probably strum some open strings during the transition, and that’s absolutely fine!

Play that twice, and you’ve got your verse down!

Once everything is feeling comfortable and consistent, start experimenting a bit with the strumming pattern! Looping the same pattern over and over might start to feel repetitive, so feel free to have fun and play around with it.

The Chorus

In the chorus, we’ll be introducing some new chords.

We’re going to need Emin7, Amin7 and F9.

The structure of the chorus will look like this:

The good news is, we’re going to mostly use the same strumming pattern we’ve seen before!

The only thing I’d suggest changing is the pattern on F9. On this chord, I prefer using only downstrokes, which would look like this:

This is just a way to add a bit of dynamics to our strumming. You could also play the lick I went for on the video, where I pluck the strings of the F9 chord individually instead of strumming it.

To do that, hold the F9 shape but remove your middle finger. Then, pluck the strings following this sequence:

D-B-G-e-B-G twice!

The Outro

Let’s dive in the outro of the song, we’re going to need a new chord, the only barre chord of the song, the mighty F major!

The structure of the chord progression is super simple, which is great news if you’re still not super comfortable with your barre chords:

Strumming is up to you, be creative!

You can use the same pattern we used on the verse, or go with simple downstrokes like we did at the end of the verse:

The solo is quite long, and showing you every lick would take forever, but we can still grab the essence of it, so you can play around, improvise, and play my favourite lick!

The solo is the key of A minor, so well be using shape 1 of the A minor pentatonic scale:

Now, on to my favourite lick of that solo. Start by playing the A string on fret 3, then fret 2 with a small bluesy bend to add a bit of tension. Finish with the open A string!

Then jump to shape 1 of A minor pentatonic, but try and let the open A string ring!

A little trick for this lick: We start with a bend on the G string, but you’ll see me pulling that string down instead of pushing it up the fretboard.

The reason I’m doing that is so I don’t accidentally choke the open A string that I want to hear ring throughout the lead!

We’re not playing many notes here, and we’re staying on the D and G strings on shape 1. So what I like to do is to keep my index finger on fret 5 of the G string. It makes jumping between the two strings much easier!

In Conclusion

This is a perfect song if you know your open chords as we only need one barre chord on the outro!

So, I’d suggest spending your time mastering the verse and chorus first, and saving the outro for later if needed. No pressure to learn it all at once!

As always, try and play along with the original song, and take your time!