Stop This Train by John Mayer (Full Guitar Lesson with TABS)

Stop This Train was written by singer-songerwriter and guitarist John Mayer in the mid 2000s, it appears on his hugely successful album ‘Continuum’ and was released in September 2006. It’s a song we can all relate to and predominantly it’s the lyrics that affect us the most, at some point we all feel somewhat lost and afraid of growing older.

As well as the beautiful words to Stop This Train, the acoustic guitar is also wonderfully constructed. It isn’t an easy song to play and the tricky right hand technique will likely take some real work to get comfortable.

John employs a percussive tap on the bass strings on beats two and four throughout the song, and at the same time as these taps he plucks other strings down with the nail of his index finger. If you’ve never done this before you will almost certainly find it incredibly uncomfortable and hard to get accurate at first. For that reason I strongly recommend practising and mastering this technique before moving on to learn the rest of the song.