Duran Duran - Save a Prayer Guitar Chords Lesson - Guitar Lesson

About Save a Prayer Guitar Chords Lesson

Few songs from the early 1980s lean so heavily on a clean, arpeggiated guitar feel as this one from Duran Duran. In A major at 96 BPM, the tempo is relaxed enough that the chord shapes themselves are not the challenge. What demands attention is the right-hand arpeggio pattern: keeping it smooth, even, and locked to the pulse without rushing into the next chord change. The voicings sit in E Standard tuning, so no retuning is needed, but open-string resonance matters here. Let the notes ring into one another rather than chopping them short. The song belongs firmly in the Pop Rock world, and that shimmering, sustained quality is exactly what you are after tonally. If the arpeggio pattern feels uneven at first, isolate the trickiest chord transition and use the Practice Toolbar to loop it slowed down until the movement between shapes becomes automatic.

• The song sits in A major in E Standard tuning, so no alternate tuning is required and all standard chord shapes apply directly.
• The core guitar technique is a clean arpeggio pattern, meaning right-hand consistency and letting notes ring are more important than fretting difficulty.
• Using the Practice Toolbar to slow down any chord-change transitions will help you build the smooth, even feel the song depends on.