Black Magic Woman Guitar Lesson – Santana

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Difficulty:
Length: 24:31

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Wikipedia page
Artist website
Music video

• Barre chords
• Hammer-ons
• Minor pentatonic scale
• Minor scale
• Pull-offs
• Slides
• String bending
• Trills

Black Magic Woman is one of those songs that you’ll be whistling for a day after hearing it on the radio. It is now an epic Santana classic, even though it is only a cover, as the original was written by Fleetwood Mac 2 years before Santana and Gábor Szabó decided to make it their own.

It is also a great song to practice and refine your lead guitar skills with, as you’ll basically be practicing every single solo technique, as well as scale theory. Our Black Magic Woman guitar lesson turned out to be a really long lesson, since there are lots of things to go through, with some things left for you to look up and learn as homework 🙂

We’ll start the video tutorial by jumping straight into the intro, then learn to play that characteristic opening melodic riff. It is important to note that the song is played in the key of D minor, and you’ll want to brush up on some theory and have a look at this minor scale guitar lesson, as well as the positions of the minor pentatonic scale. This is very important in understanding the mechanics of the song and makes it much easier to learn to play.

After the melodic riff, we’ll continue with some more of the Black Magic Woman solo. We’re learning it up to the point where Santana always plays it almost the same at concerts since he usually starts improvising on the D minor scale after a while.

After the solo, we’ll be learning the verse chord progression using barre chords, and I’ll also give you a strumming pattern to use during the verse.

Black Magic Woman song details

Santana’s version of Black Magic Woman was recorded in 1970 with Gábor Szabó(1936-1982), a famous Hungarian jazz guitarist. It was adapted from the original Fleetwood Mac version (which was written by his guitarist, Peter Green).

Santana integrated Gábor Szabó’s Gypsy Queen into his version of Black Magic Woman and composed it into an interesting mix of Latin rock, Hungarian Gypsy music, blues, and jazz. This is what sets it apart from the original.

The song is played in the key of D minor in common time, and follows the chord progression Dm– Am–Dm–Gm–Dm–Am–Dm, or the minor 7 variations of the chords.

If you want to refine the skills you learned in Black Magic Woman, check out these lessons on songs by clicking these links:
Barre chords / Hammer-ons / Minor pentatonic scale / Minor scale / Pull-offs / Slides / String bending / Trills

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