How to Play "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" on the Guitar

Video Transcript

"JOE WILES: Hi. This is Joe Wiles with the Rock and Roll Conservatory on behalf of Expert Village. Right now on this segment, we're looking at our number 80, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" by Guns N' Roses. Let's take a look. The introduction to the song is a simple G, D and C chord progression. It's taken off Bob Dylan's original, and it's a cover to what Guns N' Roses did. Some of these are modified. For the G chord, for the first opening strum, it looks like this. We're actually muting the A string here with our middle finger. So the chord actually goes low E string, 3rd fret, muted A string, opened D string, opened G string and 3rd fret on the B string. Go ahead and strum that chord. Okay? Then we bring our pinkie down to the 3rd fret of the high E string, and we arpeggiate this chord. Okay, just the highest three strings, E, B, G, B. Okay? Then we move on to the D chord, and we break this chord up as well, opened D string, 2nd fret on the G string, 3rd fret on the B string, and again, 2nd fret on the high E string. It sounds like this. Lift up your middle finger to open. Again, that little run goes like this. Okay? And the C chord, we're going to hit the opened D and the opened G together, and we're going to hammer on with our middle finger to the 2nd fret. Plus you're going to hammer the whole chord on. Okay? Then we're going to break this chord up as well. We're going to hammer on that at the end. Together, slowly, it sounds like this. Give it a try, just a couple of open chords, and you arpeggiate them, which means you break them up into single notes, okay? In our next segment, we're going to talk about our number 79. I'll see you there."