Last Train Home Guitar Lesson.
In this Guitar Tutorial, I'll teach you how to play John Mayer's 'Last Train Home'.
This banger has a 1980s vibe, but not just any 1980's vibe. In the world of non stop 1980s throwbacks that we are living in, it is necessary to be very precise with your references. And this is like Bryan Adams meets Toto meets Top Gun? I don't know. Anyhow let me teach you how to play it.
The most important thing you can learn from this song is triads. Triads are what drive this song. Triads are when you only play the root, third and 5th of the chord. He plays all his triads on strings 5, 4, and 3. The rhythm guitar part revolves around triads, all played on strings 4,3,2 using syncopation. The chords themselves are quite simple, and they are right up on the screen. There are two ways you can play the rhythm guitar on this. You could play it the way john mayer plays it, or you could play a simpler version using open chords and a couple bar chords. If you want an even simpler version, you could put a capo on the 2nd fret. In that instance, (if you use the little easy B minor chord that I show you) it gets super easy. This lesson is great for beginners, because if you use a capo, you could do the whole thing with just 5 chords. There's also some single note stuff to learn. In the rhythm guitar department, he's playing single note 'parts' which I'm not sure if you would classify as lead or rhythm, but they are just one note at a time. He does that with palm muting, and he's mainly using major pentatonic to do all that stuff. Then when it comes to lead guitar, he's mainly using major pentatonic, but towards he leans toward minor pentatonic. In this lesson I break down and explain a whole bunch of his lead guitar licks, and give you time stamps so you can hear where they are in the song. You can go and listen to the exact lick that I'm talking about. The open lick is really cool it uses a volume swell. Perhaps he used a volume pedal (I'm not sure), but if you don't have one you can just use your volume knob on your guitar. He plays it in the usual tasty john mayer style, lots of vibrato, lots of expression, and I can also hear a bit of wah or auto wah going on, you might want to experiment with that to get closer to his sound. Overall cool tune, and definitely a fun one to jam over. Probably the most challenging aspect of the song is the rhythm. This is a difficult to teach and explain through a video lesson where I cannot work 1-on-1 with a student. You can book a private lesson with me. Everyone is at different levels. This might be very simple for you, or if you struggle with rhythm, the syncopation might throw you off and it might take you a little longer to get the hang of it. The trick is to keep your hand moving! At the end of this video there is a playalong, so you can practice playing the rhythm, or you can practice soloing over it.