How To Guides
Let’s play this beautiful 70s classic! This song has a fairly simple verse-chorus structure, but the combination of gentle acoustic guitar and emotive vocals keeps you hooked throughout. “Landslide”, made famous by Fleetwood Mac, is now available in Yousician for Guitar, Ukulele, and Singing.
Landslide for Guitar
by: James Neilson, Music Education Designer for Guitar
The basic riff exercise (level 1) follows the low notes from the original guitar part – it’s a great way to play along, and outline the underlying chords. Notice that the core riff repeats throughout the song, which makes it much easier to read and learn.
The cowboy chords exercise (level 5) lets you strum along with the main chords of the song: C, G, Am, D, and Em. Watch out for the strumming rhythm – it’s pretty fast, and uses some syncopation (strong up-strums), so start slow until it clicks. You can use a capo on fret 3, or hit ‘transpose’ to play without a capo.
With the melody exercise (level 7) you’ll play the beautiful vocal melody, as well as some tricky guitar melodies in the intro and interlude. Look out for the syncopated (off-beat) rhythms, as well as some high frets used in the interlude – it’s a great idea to start slow and practice one section at a time.
In the fingerpicking exercise (level 8) you will learn the original fingerpicked guitar part – it’s a real classic, and a great tune to add to your repertoire. It mostly uses a common alternating bass pattern: thumb-index-thumb-middle, so you need to make sure that’s completely automatic in order to build up enough speed. Look out in the chorus as the pattern changes, so it’ll really take some practice!
Landslide for Ukulele
by: Vellu Halkosalmi, Music Education Designer for Bass and Ukulele
The basic melody exercise (level 2) mostly follows the lead vocal part. Use one finger per-fret rule to know which finger to use for fretting, with index finger playing all the notes on the 1st fret and so on.
In the chords exercise (level 4) you’ll be strumming all the chords of this song. Pay attention to the strumming pattern. Most of the time you will strum on beats 1, 2 and 4, so you will skip strumming on beat 3.
The fingerpicking exercise (level 7) is a nice fingerpicking trainer. The picking pattern stays the same almost in every bar. Try using either thumb-index-thumb-middle or thumb-middle-index-ring patterns. Naturally, you can master them both while you’re at it! Watch out for the endings of each section, those are the spots where there are some variations to the picking pattern.
Landslide for Singing
by: Arttu Juntunen, Music Education Designer for Piano and Singing
Study the lyrics of this song, and try to think what they mean to you. Can you connect the phrases of the song to real moments and emotions in your life? You can create your own meanings to songs to add emotion.