Zombie by The Cranberries


A few of my beginner guitar students recently started learning Zombie by The Cranberries, so I thought I’d put together a quick “how to” video for how to play it.

It’s a really cool song for beginners because there are only four chords played throughout the whole song. The chords are also pretty straightforward to play.

The Chords:

The chords for Zombie are:

E minor

C major 7

G6

G6add2/F#

Playing and Changing Chords

There are a couple of different ways to play and change between these chords, and I’ve selected what I consider to be the easiest form of action.

E minor to C major 7

We’re playing the E minor with fingers 2 and 3 and glide changing to the C major 7 using finger 2 on the A string.

C major 7 to G6

We then change to the G6 chord by bringing finger 2 up one string to the low-E string whilst simultaneously putting finger 1 on to fret 2, A string.

G6 to G6add2/F#

Next, we remove finger 1 and glide finger 2 back to fret 2 on the low-E string to play the G/add9F#.

G6add2/F# to E minor

And finally, we return to the E minor by bringing finger 2 down one string to fret 2, A string whilst simultaneously putting finger 3 on to fret 2, D string.

The Strumming Pattern

The original strumming pattern is quite tricky and looks like this:

D D D DU UD UDU

I’ve simplified it ever so slightly in the video to this:

D D D DU UD DUD

We can further simplify it by playing all down strums – 8 per chord (also in video):

D D D D D D D D

The Original – Live/Acoustic

Here is the original song played live, and this is the video I used to decipher what chords were being played. Notice that she actually plays the C major 7 and the G6 with fingers 2 and 3. You can try this too, although I’ve opted to use fingers 1 and 2 for these chords because they just worked better in the lesson for my students.