The Beatles – Blackbird Video Guitar Lessons

By Carl Brown | December 6, 2014 |


The Beatles' acoustic classic "Blackbird" is one of the most popular acoustic guitar songs in music history.

Written by Paul McCartney for the White Album, it uses Baroque influenced guitar lines throughout. Paul McCartney has stated that the guitar parts in "Blackbird" where highly influenced by Bach's "Bourree in E minor", which he and George Harrison both tried to learn as a showpiece in their early days.

The picking style involves both the bass notes and melody notes moving at the same time in a contrapuntal fashion. Paul McCartney employs one of his favorite finger picking patterns throughout most of the song to great effect. Even without vocals the guitar stands on its own in "Blackbird" with beautiful chromatic bass lines and harmonies.

It truly is an acoustic guitar masterpiece that everyone should learn to play at some point. Good luck!! 😀

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The Beatles "Blackbird" - Intro, Verse & Turnaround

The Beatles "Blackbird" -Â Chorus, Bridge & Outro

Posted in Song Lessons and tagged , , , ,

9 Comments

  1. John Maher on February 2, 2015 at 10:43 am

    Carl, thanks so much for your awesome lessons. I just discovered your site a week ago and have progressed a lot. My question is, is there really an intro to Blackbird? It seems that when you refer to the verse you include what I thought was the intro. One thing that would help immensely is if you did the entire song uninterrupted. Or do you have a link to a video you would recommend watching to see the entire song played? Thanks again.

    • Carl Brown on February 3, 2015 at 1:28 pm

      The intro contains the same part as the verse but they are still separate sections.

      I quite doing the performance videos because YouTube kept pulling them down. So my hands are tied there. However, there are TONS of videos of Paul McCartney playing Blackbird live on the web. Just do a quick search on YouTube. 🙂

      Carl…

  2. tim hanson on September 30, 2016 at 9:11 am

    Just wondering if tablature is available for McCartney’s song Blackbird.

  3. Rich Ray on October 6, 2017 at 5:58 pm

    Hi Carl,
    Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy learning songs on your website. You break everything down and do it slowly so as to take the barrier away between the artists that wrote the songs and people like me that are not accomplished musicians yet. I love Blackbird and was surprised how easy it was to learn. Thank you Carl and thank you Paul.

  4. John Sill on August 17, 2018 at 1:30 pm

    Hey Carl,
    I love the style of how you teach and break everything down (and make it seem really easy).

    I’ve been trying to learn this song for longer then I care to mention…I seem to know all of the parts to the song but have a tough time trying to peace them altogether. I will be doing a web search of PM playing the song in full and just try to learn by osmosis.

    I know your hands are tied but (like another user posted) it would be nice if you could play the song entirely and announce which part your are playing at the time: intro, verse, turnaround, chorus…etc.

    Keep up the great work that you are doing. I appreciate it very much.

    Thanks,
    John R. Sill

  5. Dory on June 27, 2020 at 2:41 pm

    Hey Carl!
    Great lesson! I’ve played this similarly for a long, long time, but never pieced it together to play it as one song. You tied it all into one nice song for me! Thank you so much!!
    Dory 😀

  6. Clark on June 11, 2022 at 9:19 am

    Thank you Carl, I’m learning so much about guitar and how to play great Beatles songs. Thank you.

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