Paul | Guitar Lessons and Performance - Paul Elwood

How to play “I can’t help falling in Love”

“Can’t Help Falling in Love” is a song written by Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, and George David Weiss and published by Gladys Music, Inc. The melody is based on “Plaisir d’amour“, a popular French love song composed in 1784 by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. The song was initially written from the perspective of a woman as “Can’t Help Falling in Love with Him”, which explains the first and third line ending on “in” rather than words rhyming with “you”.

Recorded by singer and actor Elvis Presley, it was part of the album Blue Hawaii (1961), the soundtrack to the movie Blue Hawaii. The song was recorded subsequently in the 1960s by Perry Como, the Lennon Sisters, Doris Day, Patti Page, Andy Williams, Al Martino and Keely Smith. In the 1970s, the song was recorded by Marty Robbins, Bob Dylan,

Paul2026-08-09T07:48:06-04:00

Dock of the Bay on guitar

Dock of the bay lead sheet

“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is a song co-written by soul singer Otis Redding and guitarist Steve Cropper. It was recorded by Redding twice in 1967, including once just three days before his death in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. The song was released on Stax Records’ Volt label in 1968, becoming the first ever posthumous single to top the charts in the US. It reached number 3 on the UK Singles Chart.

Redding started writing the lyrics to the song in August 1967, while sitting on a rented houseboat in Sausalito, California. He completed the song in Memphis with the help of Cropper, who was a Stax producer and the guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.’s. The song features whistling and sounds of waves crashing on a shore.

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that what is deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” -E. E. Cummings

Paul2026-09-02T12:42:36-04:00

How to play “Bye Bye Blackbird”

bye bye blackbird chart

“Bye Bye Blackbird” is a 1926 song written by composer Ray Henderson and lyricist Mort Dixon and published by Jerome Remick. It is considered a popular standard and was first recorded by Sam Lanin‘s Dance Orchestra in March 1926.

Popular recordings in 1926 were by Nick Lucas, Gene Austin, Benny Krueger, and by Leo Reisman. It was the number 16 song of 1926 according to Pop Culture Madness.

Julie London recorded it on her 1957 album Julie. The same year, Miles Davis recorded “Bye Bye Blackbird” for his album Round About Midnight.

In 1968, Joe Cocker made a recording of “Bye Bye Blackbird” that was included on his 1969 album With a Little Help From My Friends. AllMusic reviewer Matthew Greenwald described it as a “classic pop gospel ballad”.

Ringo […]

Paul2026-08-08T08:31:02-04:00

How to play “Ain’t Misbehavin'” on guitar

aint misbehavin chart

How to play “Ain’t Misbehavin'” on guitar

ain’t misbehavin’. First performed at the premiere of Connie’s Hot Chocolates in Harlem at Connie’s Inn as an opening song by Paul Bass and Margaret Simms, and repeated later in the musical by Russell Wooding’s Hallelujah Singers. Connie’s Hot Chocolates was transferred to the Hudson Theatre on Broadway during June 1929, where it was renamed to Hot Chocolates and where Louis Armstrong became the orchestra director. The script also required Armstrong to play “Ain’t Misbehavin‘” in a trumpet solo, and although this was initially slated only to be a reprise of the opening song, Armstrong’s performance was so well received that the trumpeter was asked to climb out of the orchestra pit and play the piece on stage. As noted by Thomas Brothers in his book Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism, Armstrong was first taught “Ain’t Misbehavin'” by Waller himself, “woodshedding” it until he could “play all around it”; he cherished it “because it was ‘one of those songs you could cut loose and swing with.'”

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: the only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Paul2026-08-08T07:25:34-04:00

Happy Birthday

Paul2026-08-26T07:03:31-04:00

Power chords!

If you think about a scale as having eight notes – do re me fa so la ti do- and then assign numbers to the notes, you’d get one through 8, right? So your first note would be 1 and your last note would be 8 The one note is the “root” note in the scale and the other notes all different jobs to do when we play them as chords.

For instance a major chord has the scale notes 1, 3 and 5. For a C scale, which has no sharps or flats, the notes corresponding to the numbers 1 through 8 are C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C. So for our major C chord, 1,3 and 5 are the notes C, E and G. That makes a C major chord.

When you take the 3rd out though, something interesting happens. Playing the 1 and the 5 makes a very beefy, crunchy sort of chord, and playing a simple 1/4/5 pattern with that power chord is like the basis for tons of rock’n roll songs.

Conveniently for us as guitar players it doesn’t matter if you play the 5th note above or below the 1st note, and we have two strings in standard tuning, the D string and […]

Paul2026-08-24T14:51:58-04:00

Hotel California

How to play Hotel California. This is a GREAT tune and not too hard to get the basic changes down. I’m including a link to the chord diagrams here and the chord and lyric sheet here. Have some big fun playing this great Eagles classic tune!

You can also play this using the same chords as above, but in a different position – descending on the neck! This would be a good place to start if you wanted to do a Joe Walsh- type lead line over the changes also.

…a solo fingerstyle version that includes the techniques discussed in the previous videos.

“As long as you’re excited about what you’re playing, and as long as it comes from your heart, it’s going to be great.” – John Frusciante

Paul2026-08-24T07:37:06-04:00

Lola

“Lola” is a song by the English rock band the Kinks, written by frontman Ray Davies for their 1970 album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One. The song details a romantic encounter in a Soho bar between a young man and Lola, who is possibly a trans woman or cross-dresser. In the song, the narrator describes his confusion towards Lola, who “walked like a woman but talked like a man”, yet he remains infatuated with her.

The song was released as a single in the United Kingdom on 12 June 1970, while in the United States it was released on 28 June 1970. Commercially, “Lola” reached number two on the UK Singles Chart and number nine on the Billboard Hot 100. The track has since become one of the Kinks’ most popular songs and appears on Rolling Stone and NME‘s lists of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

Say no to almost everything – Warren Buffett

Paul2026-08-06T13:56:56-04:00

C and his excellent minor relative, Am

We know the C scale has no flats or sharps and we can play it in the first position using D, G and B open strings.
We can play, as shown here: C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C

Also the C scale continues both below and above the two Cs, so we can actually start playing that scale from the open E and above the C on the B string, as far as we want. Let’s go to G (third fret of the E string) so we’re using the C scale notes on the first 3 frets including open strings.A Minor (Am) is the relative minor of C and it doesn’t have any sharps or flats either! You can spell the Am scale just like the C scale just starting on the A! Try it out! What this means is, we can play these notes over changes like Am, G, F and Em which would be 1, 7, 6 and 5.