You know you need to master your fundamentals to play guitar music. However, most people, especially beginners, learn best when they put their fundamentals lessons together with easy songs for guitar, and Beatles songs fit that bill. There are many easy Beatles songs to learn, but the following nine are our favorites.
9 Easy Beatles Songs You Can Play on Guitar
We chose these songs specifically because they stick to the basics, helping reinforce your playing foundations and thus, making you a better player.
So, brush up on your basic chords for guitar and strumming patterns, and get ready to master the following Beatles songs!
1. Yellow Submarine
Even if you haven’t heard the whole song, the chances are that you’ve heard the title “Yellow Submarine. This song is quite well-known, and even better, it’s a children’s song. If you have children, they might enjoy being with you while you learn it, or they may enjoy learning it themselves.
You might even try learning it together for some excellent bonding time.
This song is at the top of our list because it’s a children’s song, which puts it among the top easy Beatles songs on guitar. You have five chords to play, and there is a lot of strumming of all six strings, which makes it feel less like a lesson piece and more like, well, an actual song.
The five chords you’ll play are G major, D major, C major, E minor, and A minor. As you’ve been working on your chords, you shouldn’t have too much trouble playing these. Remember to start slow and pick up the tempo as you get more comfortable with it.
Next: Best songs with a color in the title
2. Here Comes The Sun
I love this song. It’s one of my favorite Beatles songs of all time. The fact that it’s easy to learn on guitar helps a lot, too. The introduction of the song is close to the fingerings you have been practicing, so there are no awkward position shifts or stretches that you’ve barely tried.
In fact, you’ll get to practice your beginner skills with the intro. But even better is that there are a few places you can turn into solos if you’d like, and then you can show off your mad soloing skills in addition to your general playing skills.
Along with many other Beatles songs, you get to practice your strumming, too. The song is in G major and uses six chords: G major, C major, D major, A7, F major, and B-flat major. It’s worth noting that the more difficult F major and B-flat major chords occur in the chorus. Most of the song is simply a repetition of G, C, D, G, C, D.
3. Eight Days a Week
This song is one of their more famous songs, and while it’s an easy Beatles song on guitar, it’s a little more challenging than many of the others on this list because the intro is in a high register.
Beginners often find playing high up on the fretboard difficult at first, but this song doesn’t require you to extend your fingers over the guitar’s body. Because of that, you can get some practice playing up near the body.
However, if you’re not ready for that, it’s okay. It’s just the intro. The song is in D, and it uses six chords: D major, E major, G major, G6, A major, and B minor. You play the rest of these chords on frets one through four. You do a lot of strumming, making this song excellent practice for that as well.
4. All You Need is Love
This next n is one of the Beatles’ most famous songs because of its hopeful lyrics and upbeat sound. Its message of love reaches just about everyone, even when nobody’s singing the lyrics.
If you’re not familiar with finger-picking or it’s a technique you’re just beginning to learn, you might have some difficulty with the introduction. Don’t worry about that. You can use it to practice fingering techniques with your right hand while having fun playing the rest of the song.
Perhaps the thing that makes this fun, despite being simple, is that the chords aren’t open chords. Many easy guitar songs and arrangements make liberal use of that to make it smoother for you to play, but such is not the case with “All You Need Is Love.”
You do have more chords to play with this than with other songs, including A7, B7, D7, A minor, F-sharp major, G major, E7, and E-minor 7. You can teach yourself the song once you know the chords.
Next: The top Beatles love songs of all time
5. Don’t Let Me Down
This song is easy enough that you can make it one of the first songs you learn. Despite some of the unusual things in this song, it has a natural bluesy feel to it that you’ll enjoy learning to play.
The song itself is in E, but if you’re going to learn an easy arrangement, then playing it in D may work better for you because you have just three chords to worry about. The chords you’ll use in this song are D major, E-minor 7, and A7.
To make things even better for you, the D major chord is three-fingered, the E-minor 7 is a one-finger open chord, and the A7 is just two fingers. Everything is on the second and third frets as well.
“Don’t Let Me Down” is also a good song on which to practice your strumming. You might consider working on this song first since it’s exceptionally simple.
6. I Saw Her Standing There
If you want an audience to whom you can show off your fresh guitar chops, “I Saw Her Standing There” should work well for you. Oddly enough, The Beatles wrote this song as a take on a 1912 folk song called “17 Come Sunday.” To try and give a punchy vibe to the song, Paul McCartney drew his inspiration from Chuck Berry’s “Talkin’ About You.”
Like so many others, this song can help you hone and refine your strumming skills as well as your hand-to-hand and hand-eye coordination. You also need to know only four chords to play it, which are E7, B7, A7, and C.
Once you have that, you can practice an alternate strumming technique to give the song a punchier feel. It makes a great party song because of its upbeat feel. People want to dance to it, and what’s more fun than being the entertainment for a bit?
Next: The top Beatles songs of all time
7. A Hard Day’s Night
“A Hard Day’s Night” can have as many as 12 chords, but many guitarists only play six simple chords, putting the song well within your reach. Even if six chords seem like too much to you, simply remember to start slow and work your way up to the full tempo.
If you start learning the six basic chords, this song becomes one of the more easy Beatles songs on guitar than it otherwise could have been.
However, there’s a more straightforward arrangement than that, which uses only four chords: E7, B7, A7, C major. When you’ve gotten comfortable with that, you can start working on a faster-paced, alternate strumming and putting the entire song together.
Also, “A Hard Day’s Night” has a far more forgiving tempo than other Beatles songs. “Faster-paced” still means slower than other pieces, adding to how easy it is to learn this song.
8. I Wanna Be Your Man
Another well-known Beatles song, this one is another that you can learn, master, and then perform for your audience, showing off your new skills.
This is among the first songs where Ringo Starr actually sang, so you’re playing a piece of history when you play this. You’re also playing an impossibly easy song that uses just one single chord: E7.
If you’re familiar with the E7 chord and some two-note power cords, you can use this song to practice things like bending the strings to change their pitch slightly to sliding your fingers into various positions to create that blues sound.
9. Love Me Do
This is one of the Beatles’ earliest songs, and not many people know its history. This song had written lyrics before the Beatles got together. When you play this song, you’re playing a piece of little-known Beatles history.
“Love Me Do” is exceptionally easy because it features only three chords. The original song is in G major and only has two chords in its verse: G and C major. John Lennon took his budding musical wizardry and added a D major chord to the bridge.
If you’re still early in your learning and not very comfortable moving between chords and coordinating your hand movements yet, “Love Me Do” is an excellent song with which to practice these things. You’ll also get more comfortable with these three chords in sequence while learning this song.
Since it’s just three chords, you can show off your growing skills to your friends and family earlier than you might think. What could be more fun than that?
Read Next:
How hard is it to learn guitar really?
Try some great guitar duet songs
As the Head Editor and Writer at Music Grotto, Liam helps write and edit content produced from professional music/media journalists and other contributing writers. He works closely with journalists and other staff to format and publish music content for the Music Grotto website. Liam is also the founding member of Music Grotto and is passionate in disseminating editorial content to its readers.
Liam’s lifelong love for music makes his role at Music Grotto such a rewarding one. He loves researching, writing and editing music content for Music Grotto.