Plush Guitar Lesson – Stone Temple Pilots

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Difficulty:
Length: 18:13

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Wikipedia page
Artist website
Music video

• Barre chords
• Ghost strum
• Open chords
• Strumming patterns

One of the most popular songs created by the alternative rock band Stone Temple Pilots was Plush. Learning to play it will give you a great chance to work on your rhythm guitar skills, along with some lead guitar as well.

You’ll be learning pretty much the entire song during the video lesson, so once you can, make sure you play along with the backing track to Plush as well. That is really the most important takeaway of the lesson.

Plush is mainly about rhythm guitar, and guitarists are notoriously known for not having a great sense of timing. Playing songs like Plush, where you have lots of rhythmic strumming and timing, can really help us rhythm-challenged guitarists keep time better.

Our guitar lesson on Plush will cover the intro, verse, bridge, chorus, another chorus which I’ll call chorus 2, and a lead bit played by the 2nd guitarist.

We’ll start out with the intro, which is used later on as a bridge, and the outro as well. The fingerings may be a bit tricky at first, but you’ll get used to it quickly.

Next off, we’ll be learning to play the chords you’ll need for the verse, which is also played during a chorus. It has several barre chords, which will give you a great opportunity to practice and refine your barre chord-changing skills as well. You’ll also be using a nice strumming pattern, incorporating muted ghost strums in between each chord change, which is really cool and is used in thousands of other songs as well. We’ll also learn a second chorus bit, which uses 2 chords from the 1st chorus, so should be a snap once you are comfortable with the first chorus.

We’ll also be learning an interesting bridge section, and we’ll finish off the tutorial on Plush by learning the lead part that the second guitarist plays during the chorus.

I am a firm believer in the idea that learning barre chords is made much easier by learning them through playing songs, so please do go and try your best. It will take a while if you’re still struggling with barre chords, but hey, I went through the same process, and so did Slash, Eric Clapton, and everyone else who ever learned guitar.

As you can see, it’s a long lesson, but it’s not complicated at all, so get to it 🙂

Plush  song details

Plush was released on the 1992 album Core by Stone Temple Pilots, an American alternative rock band. Plush was the song that put STP on the map and made them critically acclaimed. An acoustic version of the song was performed as well on a live show, which became very popular.

The song reached #1 on the US Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in 1993.

If you want to refine the skills you learned in Plush, check out these lessons on songs by clicking these links:
Barre chords / Ghost strum / Open chords / Strumming patterns

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