Piano Man Guitar Lesson – Billy Joel
In this guitar lesson, I will show you how to play all the chords to Billy Joel's classic "Piano Man" on the guitar.
Feel free to use an acoustic or electric guitar for this one even though I am teaching it on an acoustic guitar.
The chords you will learn in learn in this Piano Man guitar lesson are actually pretty easy to play. That usually isn't the case when we are trying to make a song that was originally written on the piano, playable on the guitar without leaving standard tuning or using a capo. But we are in luck here, no strange tuning or capo needed. 🙂
Since the original recording was in C major, you will find that it fits quite nicely on the guitar.
Having said that, the chords do move around very quickly, so getting everything up to speed can be a nice challenge for those with a little less playing experience. The great thing is that the picking remains the same for pretty much every chord in the song and it is a very easy picking pattern. That will free up your mind a bit so you can focus on getting those chords changes smooth.
The lesson starts with me showing you the two chords for the intro where Billy Joel does a little improvisation. Obviously, we can only play the chords and not the little piano licks.
We will also run into this situation a little later in the song with the familiar piano riff. What I have done here is condense the piano riff so it at least contains one of the main melodies of that riff within the chords.
So I hope you enjoy learning this classic. It would be a great song to play at a party and guitar arrangements like these always seem to impress. 🙂
Carl...
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