By Robert Johnson starts out with this really cool little guitar riff. You remember from big road blues, we had this that lick and we played it really starting from a double stop over the second position barre chord. That's a D. Now we're in G. So Levin vein is in the key of G. This is a second position G bar chord. So we're going to make that double stop with our first finger on the 10th fret of the first string and my ring finger on the 12th fret of the second string. If you listen carefully to the way he starts it out, he does something like this. He's just doing that same movement.
So we've got this G, we're moving everything down one fret to the ninth, and the 11th. Then we're going to the eighth and the 10th. And then we're ending up with our first finger on the seventh fret of the first string and our second finger on the eighth fret of the second string. The way picks in it sounds almost like he's using just the thumb. Which you can do like I showed you in the last thing, you can grip the thumb with your first finger and play the thumb pick like a flat pick. Or you could do it with your thumb and first finger I don't know.
Like, that doesn't come easy to me. So I just use the flat pack. He just kind of a choppy choppy rhythm and he does that by changing the pressure on the strings. To kind of mess around with that moves it down. So this is the intro and then he's going to come to a G chord which is the same turnaround that we used and step it up and go with our pinky on the third fret of the first string. And we're walking down the fourth string, three to one, back to a G. And then he wraps it up going to a D seven chord.
So the whole intro for Robert Johnson's love in vain. Then we go into the first verse. The verses of love and vain are really pretty simple. It's just a matter of getting the chords and the picking down. If you listen to the original, he's pretty sparse with the courts. If you're playing this as an instrumental and you need to fill things out like I do, then you have to throw in a little more with the first finger.
So I'll play it the way I play it. And if you listen to the original, you'll hear the difference, but it's the same. He's playing the same stuff. So it starts out on a G. All I'm doing is just with a normal t chord, I'm dumping the sixth string. My first finger just brushing up on the first second, a little bit of the third strike. Then right here, going to that g7 So what I'm doing is picking it picking my first finger off the first string and I'm alternating my right finger.
My first finger picking between the second and the first strings. Then he's going to go to a C we're thumping on the fifth string now. Here comes the tricky part is going back to that C seven and then right here quick D seven to a G. So let's play everything we have so far and Levin will skip the introduction and just take it from the first verse. So we got the G again, then we're gonna go to an a seven to a D seven to achieve the open second string, and then pinch in the sixth string with the G chord shape and the first string into our turn around. And he just does that over and over again as far as the verses go. So let me play loving Dane one more time around for you.
I'll try to play it slowly.