I Will Follow You Into The Dark Guitar Lesson – Death Cab For Cutie

In this lesson I will teach you a note-for-note breakdown of Death Cab For Cutie's acoustic hit "I Will Follow You Into The Dark".

Written and performed entirely by lead vocalist Ben Gibbard, "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" has become the band's best selling single to date due to it's beautiful vocal melodies, introspective lyrics and haunting guitar chords.

In this I Will Follow You Into The Dark guitar lesson you will learn the two main chord progressions used within the song. In fact, the entire song is made up of just these two chord progressions with just a couple variations (which I will cover as well).

Make sure your guitar is in standard tuning with a capo positioned at the 5th fret. During the video lesson I will call out every fret as it is compared to the capo. In other words, if you play the 6th fret I will actually call it the 1st fret since it is just one fret up from the capo. Essentially the capo is your open strings or zero fret. That will make it much easier for me to just call out a C major chord and you play that compared to the capo instead of confusing you with a bunch of fret numbers.

The first thing you will probably want to focus on before getting into all the chords is the right hand picking pattern. That picking pattern stays rather consistent throughout the entire song but can be a bit awkward at first. Just grab one chord in the left hand (like the opening A minor), and work on that picking pattern for a while. As soon as you feel like you can not only lock into a consistent groove, but also control the dynamics with the picking pattern you can then start learning how to play the chords.

The chords for "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" are rather basic and won't provide too much of a challenge for you. There is only one barre chord to contend with and the rest are simple open position chords.

As I go through the lesson and teach you the two main chord progressions of the song, I will also let you know where the variations are that happen within the song. These variations are actually quite easy to play and are just thrown in there to make the song a little less repetitive. It would be a good idea to become very familiar with the way "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" sounds to help you understand where to place those variations.

Have fun guys!

Carl...

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I Will Follow You Into The Dark Guitar Lesson