One of Fender Play’s earliest lessons in Level 1 for Acoustic or Electric guitar in the Rock Genre is “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple taught by Molly Miller. It’s a modified / simplified riff setup on one string. The exercise starts with the Open G. You fret the practice riff using fingers 1-4 and doesn’t require moving your hand. It’s an easy entry early lesson into one of Rock’s most popular and well-known songs.
Smoke on the Water – Extra Credit
As I got more and more comfortable with this practice riff, I started looking for some “Extra Credit” practice. Marty Schwartz also does a lesson with Smoke on the Water and it’s worth looking into if you’d like to stretch yourself at this point of the Fender Play lessons. It’s different from the Fender Play version in a couple ways. First it uses the D-string and requires you to move your up and down the neck to fret the notes. It’s very similar to Fender Play’s old Seven Nation Army practice riff with Sydney Ellen. When you’re better at the D-string only version, you can do the A and D string version that Marty teaches as his extra credit exercise.
What I don’t like about the Marty Music lesson is that it’s pretty much just a video of him showing you how to play the practice riff. No tabs. No metronome or timer. If you’re starting out on this, I recommend you set your metronome to 45 or 60 and start your practice there. You can gradually speed it up to 90 as you get more comfortable. I highly recommend using the metronome. It’s far easier to do the Marty Music lesson without the metronome, but you get a lot more out of it when the metronome forces you to maintain timing. I know keeping to that metronome can be tough. It’s pressure when practicing and it really makes your shortcomings visible when you can’t keep time, but I still recommend it (even if I don’t always do this myself…).
I’m well into Fender Play’s Level 4 lessons now, but I’ll still do the Marty Music lesson from time to time. I try to use it as string muting practice. See the Songsterr.com Smoke on the Water tab for more.
Songsterr.com has a tab for Smoke on the Water, but I don’t recommend it at Level 1 of your Fender Play guitar journey. I’ve included a link to it if you’re curious how the “real” version works.