Parka Life

Music Lesson: Park A Life

Introduction

We're now moving on to the song Park A Life, inspired by some indie music. It's a hint of the song Park Life by Blur. If you've got some spare time, it might be nice to listen through to this song and pay attention to the kind of guitar parts and sounds you hear.

Key Signature

For this song, every F is going to be an F. As always, we can tell this by the key signature at the start. So we're just noting that anytime we see an F, we're going up a semitone to F.

Chord Progression

The song starts off with G chords and C chords. We're going to use our one finger per fret technique as always, playing the G with our third finger and C with our first finger.

Rhythm

The thing to watch out for here is the rhythm. Luckily:

• Bars one and two have the same rhythms as bars three and four.
• We're playing a half note followed by two quarter notes: 1, 2, 3, 4, followed by a dotted half note. This lasts for three beats.

Bars One and Two

Bars one and two together should sound like this:

• 1, 2, 3, 4
• 1, 2, 3, 4
• 1, 2, 3, Four.

With beat four of bar two being a rest, we have the same rhythms in bars three and four. Applying our C chord now, it should be:

• 1, 2, 3, 4
• 1, 2, 3 and rest on beat four.

Make sure all strings are ringing out clearly. Especially with the C chord, we need to be up on our fingertip to ensure the high E is coming through clearly. We don't want to be hearing this!

Make sure we're up high so that the E's ringing out nice and clearly.

Melody

Line Two

Moving on to line two, we have the melody. This is quite simple in terms of what we've looked at before:

• We've got quarter notes, half notes, quarter notes, and half notes to finish.
• The only thing to really watch out for is the end of bar four when we have a C chord on top of our melody.

Melody Breakdown:

1. Start off by playing the open G twice, going to a C.

   • First fret on the B string going to an open B.

   So, here's bar one: 1, 2, 3, 4.

2. In bar two, we have two A's (second fret on the G string), lasting for two beats each.

   • So, we have: 1, 2, 3, 4.

3. Bar three: Open G string going to D (fret free on the B string) to the open B.

   • This translates to: G, D, D, B.

4. In bar four: First fret on the B string for C for two beats, then strumming the C chord.

   • This is going to be the same fingering, but we strum from the G string down to the high E.

Practice

Here's line two. Feel free to pause the video and go over any bars, then join me when you're ready.

• 1, 2, 3, 4.
• 2, 3, 4.
• 1, 2, 3, Four.
• 1, 2, 3, 4.
• 1, 2, 3, FOUR.

You can hear that C chord finishing off, and it's really important we get all those notes ringing out clearly.

Line Three

In line three, we share some rhythms. The rhythms in bars one and two are the same as that of bars three and four.

• We start off by playing D on the B string.
• Here are those first two bars: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Then we have the same movement but starting on a different note:

• Start on C, go to B, then A, and finish on G.

Complete Line Three Together:

• 1, 2, 3, 4.
• 1, 2, 3, Four.
• 1, 2, 3, four.
• 1, 2, 3, Four.

Line Four

We're picking up a bit of a theme here with line four being very, very similar to line one. The only difference is bar four. Instead of playing a C, we're finishing on a G chord.

Recap:

• 1, 2, 3, 4.
• 1, 2, 3, Four.
• 1, 2, 3, four.
• 1, 2, 3, FOUR.

It would be a good idea to pause this video and practice moving between C and G‚ one strum of each, one beat of each. This is really going to build our muscle memory and help us move between these shapes much faster.

Additional Resources

Remember, you can head over to the interactive sheet music to loop and slow down this piece. I'll see you there!

Try to play this song from start to finish.