House Of The Rising Sun | TAB
My favourite thing about House Of The Rising Sun is that the picking pattern holds an obvious secret to getting better – the open G string at the end of every chord.
You must always think like this when playing guitar: How can I create a part that changes from one chord to another in a smooth way?
With House Of The Rising Sun, this has been done for us, all you need is a correct transcription to see all these great lessons.
With all this in mind, let’s look at House Of The Rising Sun’s chords using TAB. Here’s the intro.
Spend plenty of time playing the intro/instrumental section using a metronome. With my tap tempo metronome, you can set a timer. Do this for, let’s say 60 seconds, then increase the tempo with just 2 BPM.
Once you can play this accurately, not necessarily fast, play the verse as well. Do this mainly for variation, all the chords are the same, just repeated in a few different ways, like this:
Make sure you can see how every single last 8th note is an open G, apart from in bar 7 since we are playing an E chord again.
Finally, I haven’t seen anyone mention online or in person when talking about how to play House Of The Rising Sun. Towards the end, the guitar stops this picking pattern and starts to strum instead.
Below, you’ll find the TAB for how you could do this. On the recording, the guitarist misses a few notes here and there so what you see below is ideal, not a perfect transcription.
The strumming is broken up, aim to hit these notes, should you include a few more or less, that’s OK. This is not the case for the picking part, which should be played perfectly, exactly as the TAB shows.
Once you’ve spent a few days playing House Of The Rising Sun as an exercise, have a go at playing along with the original recording (top of this page) from beginning to end.
At the full tempo, this is hardly a beginner song!
House Of The Rising Sun TAB | Related Pages
House Of The Rising Sun | Chords + Lyrics
You can learn to play House Of The Rising Sun by The Animals using chords, lyrics, a chord chart, chord analysis, and the original recording.
| Am | C | D | F |
There is a house in New Orleans…
Five similar tunes | Chords + Lyrics
The Animals tunes
Not just known for having written one of the world’s most famous beginner guitar songs, The Animals’ bass player also discovered Jimi Hendrix.
After seeing Jimi on tour with his band, he took him to England, introduced him to Eric Clapton, recorded Hey Joe, and changed the world.
The Animals on the web
About me | Dan Lundholm
This guitar lesson by Dan Lundholm featuring TAB covers House Of The Rising Sun. Discover more about him and how you can learn guitar with Spytunes.
Most importantly, find out why you should learn guitar through playing tunes, not practising scales, and studying theory in isolation.