Magic Carpet Ride Guitar Lesson – Steppenwolf


In this Magic Carpet Ride guitar lesson video, I will show you to play all the chords for Steppenwolf's biggest hit.

"Magic Carpet Ride" is an excellent rhythm guitar workout because of it's funky rhythms and liberal use of left hand muting. Because this rhythm is so important to the overall feel of the song, I will spend a lot of time in the video lesson teaching you how to achieve that funky rhythm as quickly as possible.

The chords used throughout "Magic Carpet Ride" are basic bar chord shapes, but they do move around at a pretty fast speed making them tricky to execute, especially with the rhythm work in the strumming hand added into the mix.

I will demonstrate this section at a very slow tempo so you can begin to follow along and eventually speed it up to the full speed heard on the original recording.

There is a cool jam session in the album version of the song as well. There is a repeated guitar lick going on here that incorporates a hammer-on. This same lick is found in the turnaround section of the song as well, albeit based around a different chord.

During this section, make sure you focus on the timing of the hammer-on. It should be heard as a quick grace note.

Hope you guys enjoy learning this classic from Steppenwolf!

Carl...

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Magic Carpet Ride Guitar Lesson - Steppenwolf

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