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A Horse With No Name by America | acoustic

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An acoustic guitar lesson on how to play "A Horse With No Name" by America from their 1972 debut album.

I've been meaning to do a lesson on this song for years, so I finally got around to it!

A Horse With No Name is so ingrained in our culture. It's such an iconic song there's probably not many people in the world who haven't heard it.

I recently watched Breaking Bad again, which is such a great series and there's a scene where Walter White is driving through the desert listening to the radio and singing along with A Horse With No Name. It sort of reminded me of what a great song it is!

Most people teach the song as having just 2 chords, but when you take a deeper dive into it, the 2 guitar parts combined actually play 9 chords. Two of those are the same chord, but in different tunings and with different fingerings and voicings so I guess you could argue there are just 7 chords. Nevertheless, there's a lot more to this song than many people realize. I go over all of that in depth in the video.

The strumming in this one is key to getting it to sound good. There are a couple of different patterns in the main part. I go over those in the video. As simple as it sounds, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't quite capture the feel of the guitar in the intro but it's as close to the original as I could get it.

I also go over the cool little guitar solo. Except for a couple of notes at the end, the entire solo is played on the high E string. I also break down the cascading harmony guitar parts at the end of the solo.

I really enjoyed working on this one as it's one of my all time favorite songs! I hope you get something from the video and that it helps you to understand what's going on in the original recording. Cheers
Andy

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