How to Play “I Want to Hold” on a Guitar

Hey, Rhythm Strummers. Here’s an easy way to play this great Beetle song.

[Demonstration]

Now, I can only play you about 30 seconds of this song on our free lesson, so I’m going to save a little bit for later. But in the meantime, I want to show you some really cool stuff that’s useful for this song and a ton of others.

The cool thing about RhythmStrummer.com is it’s dedicated to helping beginning and the intermediate guitarist play really cool songs. And so I want to show you a couple of things here that are going to make you sound great.

The first one is a substitution for the B minor chord. A lot of you probably hate the B minor. I did too for a long time. It’s a real pain but came up with great substitution for it. It’s the Bm7 and it’s an open chord which means it’s not barred, it’s a lot easier to fret. So, let me show you how to play this.

You put your first finger, that’s your pointer finger on the fifth string second fret. Then put your second finger or your middle finger on the third string second fret and your third finger which is your ring finger on your first string second fret. So you’re kind of alternating finger, open string, finger-open string-finger. And either mute or avoid the sixth string. I mute the string with my thumb so that the string sounds like this.

But if you’ve got a smaller hand you’re just going to need to avoid it with you’re right hand technique strumming fifth string with you're first string. So that’s the Bm7 chord and you can use it pretty much any time there is a B minor chord in the song.

The second thing I want to show you is a strum pattern that I just used and that is useful for tons of other great songs. I called it the folks strum pattern but it’s not just folk music. And it goes like this down-down-up-up-down-up and before I show it to you I just want to give you a recommendation for learning any strum pattern.

If you’re having a hard time learning a pattern, try learning to say the pattern before you play it, if you can say it you can play it and so I’m just going to say the pattern as I play and as I chant try to memorize it and then say it along with me. And then once you think you’ve got it down saying it then try coming in with the playing.

[Demonstration]

One and two and three and four and down-up, how are you doing? Try to play it along with me. This is how it goes in the song.

[Demonstration]

So, I hope you got a lot over that lesson, go practice that stuff and then we’d love to see you at RhythmStrummer.com, bye.