Guitar Noise

One of the easiest ways to quickly improve your guitar playing is to start thinking of your instrument as being more than just a single guitar. What am I talking about? Well, once you’ve gotten the strumming part down and have a fairly good grasp (no pun intended) of the various chords, you can start to put together actual arrangements of songs. Even a relative beginner can get into this in a big way and you will be amazed at the simple things you can do to dramatically improve your playing, simply by approaching a song with a little thought and a little theory.

These files are the author’s own work and represents his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Today we’re going to learn Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffet. In and of itself, this will not take very long. We will only need three chords (okay, four, but one (A7) is just a simple variation of another):

And then, of course, we will need to know when to change the chords. Here is how the first verse and chorus goes:

Okay we’ve got the chords and the lyrics, how about an easy rhythm pattern? Since this is a fairly happy-go-lucky, tropical song, at a relatively moderate tempo, a nice, light, airy strumming pattern seems to be just the thing to play. I’m going to accent the first and third beats while playing eighth notes in a simple down-and-up stroke on the second and fourth beats. It’ll be like this:

So as you can see, for all intents and purposes, we’ve already got this song down cold. Ah, but that would not be much of a lesson then, would it?

As I (perhaps cryptically) mentioned at the start of this lesson, if you begin to think of your guitar as “more than just a single guitar,” then you can begin to reach a new and exciting level of playing. As beginners, guitarists tend to worry about one aspect of playing at a time and that is probably a good thing. But there comes a point where you have to branch out a bit and today we’re going to take a step in that direction.

The guitar is what we call a “polyphonic” instrument. This is a fancy way of saying that it is capable of playing more than one note at a time. It’s like a piano and most other stringed instruments and unlike, say, a trumpet or a flute.

But it often takes the average guitarist a while (and sometimes quite a while) to figure this out. We are too busy learning chords and strumming and riffs and single-note leads and we do not always appreciate that our guitars can provide us with as deep and richly textured an accompaniment as a piano.

The easiest thing to do, as a beginner, is to learn to develop a bassline as part of a strumming pattern. We did this right from the start in our very first Easy Songs For Beginners piece, Horse With No Name. Take a second and look that over if you’ve forgotten.

It would be a fairly easy thing to add a bassline (more accurately a bass note) to our strumming pattern. The most common thing to do is to play it on the first beat of every measure. Since we have a lot of space, though, let’s use it on the third beat as well. Here, then, is our “bass enhanced” pattern. I have replaced the downstrokes on the first and third beats with the letter “B” which means that we’ll play a bass note instead of a full chord on the downstroke. Our bass note in this instance is simply the root note of what- ever chord we are playing. For a D chord, it will be the open D string. On the A (or A7) chord, the open A string. The G note on the third fret of our low E string will serve as bass note for the G chord. Go on and give them a try:

Once you’ve got this down, the next step is to give your bass line a bit more spice. The simplest (and yet very cool sounding) way for a guitarist to do this is to develop what is called an “alternating bassline.” This means exactly what you’d think it might. You alternate the root note with a different note in the bass. Traditionally, the fifth is the note that alternates with the root. In the strumming pattern that we’re using on Margaritaville, it is easy to play the root on the first beat (followed by the chord on the second) and the fifth on the third beat (again followed by the chord on the fourth). Here’s what it would look like (R = “root” and F= “fifth”):

Okay, what does this mean in “real life?” Glad you asked. Since we only have three chords to work with, let’s examine them. First off, let’s take a look at our chords, as well as their roots and fifths:

Playing the D and A chords should be fairly easy, since both the roots and fifths are simply open strings. Even better, the fifth is the open string below the root (you’d almost think that someone planned the guitar that way, wouldn’t you?). The simplest way to go about playing these two chords would be like this:

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Now the G chord is also easy, although it might seem a bit confusing at first. Whenever possible, it’s a good idea for the root note to be the lowest tone (of that particular chord) that you can attain on your guitar. If your fifth happens to be lower than that, as it was on both the D and A, then great. On the G, our root is the third fret on the low E string, no problem. But our nearest fifth is above the root. In fact, it is the open D string. So be it, you have to take what your guitar will give you (unless you decide to play this in a “Drop D” tuning and that’s a whole other lesson!).

But I’ve decided something else – since the G only appears in the chorus and it is always followed by the A, I am also going to play those A chords in the same style, that is, with the higher fifth. It should make for an interesting contrast and also keep me from playing the same thing over and over. Here’s our TAB for the G as well as the “chorus” A chords:

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Since I’m already tinkering around arranging things, let’s do two more easy steps. First off, on the penultimate line in the chorus (”…some people claim…”) I am going to simple hold the last three chords, just like on the recording. Two beat hold on the D and A chords with a whole four beat hold on the G. This way I do not have to worry at all about a bassline!

Secondly, I am going to do a short “walking” bassline between the D and G chords in the chorus, like this:

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This also offers a bit of variety and keeps the bass part from being too static. The trick of any walking bassline is to make certain that you arrive at the proper note at the proper time. No problem here. Since the G is on the first beat, I simply play F# (second fret on the low E) the previous (fourth) beat and play the open E string the beat before that. Piece of cake.

So you see, with a minimum of effort, we’ve taken a song that, in all likelihood, we would have simply strummed and given it some added depth and color.

Okay, this covers about everything. Oh, wait a minute – as a bonus I wrote out the “signature riff” that is played as the intro. You can also use this to end the song if you want to sound like the recording. Just tack it on to the end off the last chorus. The reason I’m doing this is a bit of a tease. It’s a very simple thing to do and we soon will be covering the theory behind it and a lot of other “quick and easy lead licks” over on the Guitar Columns page. Most likely in June or July. Please don’t think that it will be too hard for you; I think you will surprise yourself at how easily you both understand and master some of these simple tricks. It’s like almost anything with music theory – once you get over the fact that it’s neither as hard nor as boring as you thought, there is no end to the fun you can have. Or to the good things it can do for your playing.

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As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or topics you’d like to see covered in future columns. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodge@guitarnoise.com.

Until next week…

Peace