Wonderful Tonight Guitar Lesson

This song is a great example of how chords and chord progressions don’t have to be complex to be tasty and instantly recognisable. If you’re not playing barre chords yet, but still want to play a proper Clapton song, this one’s perfect!

The Intro

Let’s start with the lead intro for the song, the song is in G Major, and we’ll need quite a few different shapes of the G Major pentatonic scale. We need to know where shapes 4, 5, 1 and 2 are.

When you’re playing a major pentatonic scale, shape 2 starts naturally from your major root note. So shape 2 of G Major would start on fret 15. You can then work backwards to figure out where the other shapes are.

On top of the major pentatonic scale, we’ll also need one extra note, the 4th!

Here are the shapes you’ll need, and that extra note:

The best way to position your fingers is to start off with your middle finger on fret 9 on the G string.

That way, your index finger can easily reach for fret 8 on the B string, and the third finger can play fret 10 on the B string. That little box, part of shape 2, is something you’ll see a lot in different songs, so spend some time on it!

Time to look at the other layer we have on this intro, the chords! The chord progression is pretty simple, and we’ll only need three different open chords.

The chords we need are G Major, D Major and C Major.

The structure is very straightforward, it looks like this:

The chords aren’t supposed to be strummed, but it can be a nice way to get started with the chord progression, so here’s a strumming pattern you could play:

The important thing to understand here is that we want to play arpeggios of these chords.

Since we’re not strumming, that means that there isn’t a strumming pattern. Instead we’ll pluck the strings of the chord shape we’re on individually, one after the other.

The only thing to be careful with is that you don’t want to play a string that you wouldn’t usually play when strumming the chord!

For example, you can play all of the strings of G Major since the chord shape allows you to do that. But on D Major, you can only play the highest 4 strings!

As there are quite a few overlapping guitar tracks, I’d rather explain to you how to do that rather than showing what could easily become an “over-the-top” way of thinking about it!

Let’s talk about when we want to play these strings. We want to pluck strings at an eighth note pace. That means you can play the string you want as long as you’re playing on a beat, or an “and”.

We also want to leave space, which means you don’t want to play a note on every eight note! That would be too “full” and it would not fit that laid-back vibe we’re looking for.

Instead, leave some of them out, adjust to taste!

Since I know that leaving you on your own with it can be overwhelming, I’ll show you a way to get started.

Remember the strumming pattern we’ve seen just above? What if you apply the same timing to your arpeggios. As in, play a single string of the shape you’re on when you’d usually be strumming every one of them.

On top of that, start each arpeggio with the root note of the chord you’re on. This will add a nice layer and your arpeggios will feel less “random”

The best thing to do is to experiment with everything I’ve just explained to you. Try to play too many notes to see how it feels, and try to not play enough! The idea is to find the range that just feels right.

The Verse

The only new chord we need to play the verse is the E minor open chord, so let’s look at this one:

Now that we have this chord, let’s dive into the structure of the verse:

Again, we want to play arpeggios of these chords! We also want to make sure that we’re being gentle with the right hand and that we’re not digging too hard into the strings. The idea is to make it sound super laid-back and not too intense.

If you look back at the structure above, you’ll see that at the end of the second line of the verse, we play a D major, which is then followed by a C Major. Let me show you a little trick here!

What we want to do is to approach this C major by playing the notes A, B and C on the A string. You’d play the open A string, then fret 2 on the same string to play the note B, and you’d land on the note C on fret 3 of the A string.

That last note is the root note of your C major chord that we have to play!

Timing-wise, you’d start that movement on beat 4 of the previous bar. So you’d play the note A on beat 4, B on the “and” of beat 4, and you’d land on the C on beat 1. Just in time to build our C Major chord when we need it!

You’ve definitely heard that on the original song as Clapton does it quite a few times throughout the song, and this is a neat little melody that shows that you know where you’re going. It also adds a bit more movement which helps keep things interesting.

Middle Eight and Outro

After the second verse that we play, we stay on G major for a couple of bars before moving into to a different part of the song, the middle eight!

The structure of that middle eight section is very similar to the intro and verse that we’ve played, and we’re only using chords we’ve seen before. We’ll need a C, D, G and E minor.

Let’s now talk about the outro of the song. The outro is again very similar to the rest of the song, but the structure changes. Let’s have a look!

One last detail

At the end of the chord progression, you’ve probably noticed a very cool melodic movement that Clapton’s playing. Now this is a very fun and potentially challenging thing to add to the song. He’s playing two strings together, moving through five different shapes on these two strings. Let me show you the five shapes we need!

As this is probably a bit too advanced, we’ll keep it simple for now. Let’s just play the shapes one after the other, from shape 1 to shape 5, and not worry too much about what they’re called for now.

Listen to the song and try to spot when this movement’s played. You’ll quickly want to play it yourself!