Tonight You Belong To Me

About This Lesson

In today’s lesson I’ll teach you guitar arrangement of Tonight You Belong To Me, inspired by the Eddie Vedder cover from his Ukulele Songs album (2011). This arrangement will also mostly work for the Steve Martin cover from the film The Jerk, the video clip of which is linked below. While Eddie and Steve play this on a ukulele (no capo), I imitate their exact sound by adding capo 5th fret to my guitar and using the Key of D chord family. This is a fun one – enjoy!

• 0:00 Lesson Intro
• 1:06 Verse Chords
• 4:24 Bridge Chords
• 5:56 Simple Strum
• 7:12 Intro Riff
• 13:29 Add’l Riffs & Strumming Tips
• 19:49 Playthrough

Quick Links

• Recommended lyric & chord sheet
• Eddie Vedder’s cover from Ukulele Songs on YouTube
• Steve Martin’s cover from The Jerk on YouTube
• Song Wikipedia Page

Practice Notes 4 pages

Lesson Discussion

Play-Along Covers

As a bonus to accompany my main video lesson, here’s two zoomed-in videos where I play the entire song using everything I teach in my main tutorial. Tabs and strumming diagrams are shown on screen, so you have a visual guide to match what I’m playing.

First, here’s a simple strum playthrough, which uses a simplified intro riff and only down-strums for the verse & bridge. I recommend starting with this! It helps you get the lay of the land.

Next, we have a full strum playthrough, which uses all the trickier techniques I teach in the second half of my main tutorial. This includes the triplet strumming during the intro, as well the walk-up & walk-down riffs during the verse.

Related Lessons I’ve Made

If you’re curious how to translate guitar chords to a ukulele (and vice versa), check out the following video!

Guitar chords on a ukulele

★ Instructional PDF

If you need help getting that D-riff under your belt (where you add and remove your pinky in the intro strumming), this lesson may help out. Being able to seamlessly go between D and Dsus4 (and Dsus2) is an incredibly helpful and often-used technique.

Enhance Your Strumming with Syncopation and Sus Chords

★ Instructional PDF

If you need help playing the G minor chord, I suggest this lesson. It focuses on the F#m chord, but this “shape” works 100% for Gm if you move everything up one fret (e.g. 3xx333). No barring required! I don’t include this in my main song tutorial above, but I wanted to add it here just the same.

How to play F#m without barring (for fingerstyle)

★ Instructional PDF

My Original Tutorial For This Song

Back in November 2013, my third ever lesson for my YouTube channel was for this very same song! For posterity, here’s that video — should you be interested. To be clear, this video is quite raw — as I was brand new at recording things for YouTube! The sound quality isn’t good. There’s no graphics or tabs on screen. I’m far less natural when being recorded. Same guitar, though!

As far as the way I teach the song — it’s largely the same, though this older version is missing a few things I’ve added in my new version above. For example — I’m fully relying on the barred version of G minor, I don’t really mention the triplet rhythm during the intro, and the riffs I teach aren’t as polished. But still — it’s fun to look back!

Another Teacher’s Guitar Arrangement

I feel compelled to share this campfire arrangement from Maurce Tani, who made this via video for Acoustic Guitar Magazine. I especially dig the first minute or so, where he goes into the history of this song in the decades leading up to Steve Martin playing it in The Jerk. Should you be looking for a different tutorial than what I offer above, this may help!