Wild Thing by The Troggs Lesson

Learn to play Wild Thing by The Troggs on JustinGuitar!


View the full lesson at Wild Thing by The Troggs | JustinGuitar

wow Justin this might not be the right way to learn A D anchor but I had fun and sped up my A D chord switch

This is great! It’s a song I love and grew up with. Still flubbing up my A to D on occasion, but my D to E goes really smoothly. Hoping my Beginner’s Songbook gets here soon so I can really learn it well.

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This is also a good song for when you’re first getting into 5th and 6th string root E and A shape barre chords. 6th string A, 5th string D and E.

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This is also a good song for when you’re first getting into 5th and 6th string root E and A shape barre chords. 6th string A, 5th string D and E.

Oh heck, let’s not confuse me too soon. lol

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This was the first song I enjoyed playing as a complete beginner as it just used A, D, E, was a good excuse to turn up the gain a bit and was actually recognisable.

I returned to it after a few months more learning. Now, I generally like to keep the strumming hand moving at a constant speed and miss strums as required. I realised that the way I was playing before wasn’t very smooth as I would use all downstrums, and speeded up the strumming for for the D major on the & 4 beats.

Now I’ve tried two different ways to strum it - hand moving at “normal” speed, i.e. one down strum per beat, and playing it as D D x UD, and it feels smooth but does use an upstrum on the D-major.

Other thing I’ve tried is moving the hand twice as fast, like sixteenth note speed, and playing it all as downstrums, so when I play the A (or E) on beats 1 and 2, I have a missed strum in between on the &. This also works but is a bit harder and seems very busy with a lot of hand movement for a few strums.

Would be interested in how other people on here play it.

taxing my memory - I do not have my guitar handy and that makes a big difference for some reason. :slight_smile: I enjoyed playing this as well early on. It does sound very recognizable even when being very new to playing. I was playing with the app, not the original.

I think I played it with down strums on the beat and up-strums on the ANDs. I think this works with one exception. I also remember playing the section after a long pause and just before “But I wanna know for sure”, alternating open strings on an up-strum with A on the down-strum. It may seem fast, but you just need to lift fingers off for the up-strum, then drop them back down for the down-strum.

I hear one place I think I would double my strum speed and do all down-strums. It happens just before the chorus and has a lot of energy, so an up-strum doesn’t sound strong enough and it feels like I would use all down on that part.

After going back and BRIEFLY listening with a more refined ear, I hear other stuff in there, like maybe muted strings on some 16th notes. I suggest you forget about those until you get further along. Get the basic rhythm working well with a strumming you like the sound of and revisit this once you get more techniques in your playing.

My advice. Listen to and watch the Troggs original. It’ll tell you all you need to know. :smiley:

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@saj78 And if you still have some questions after looking at the video @sairfingers shared, then scroll to the first post in this topic and you’ll find the link to Justin’s lesson on the song.

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The video of the Troggs guitarist looks as though he’s playing the following:

E shape A major barre chord (5th fret)
A shape D major barre chord (5th fret)
A shape E major barre chord (7th fret)

He definitely was not playing open chords. Difficult to see as the camera kept cutting off his fretboard. Could tell what he used for the G7.
Interesting “flourish” to his strumming. :o:

The 4th chord is a G6. If you play open strings 4,3,2,1, it works whether playing open A or E shaped barre A.

Yep. That does work on the E shaped A major! Sweet. Thanks!

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