This becomes very important when you encounter more complicated rhythms, as you’ll soon see. But I’d like to take a moment to clue you in to something that will also help you immensely when it comes to playing rhythm – written music notation. Notes written in musical notation do double duty. They tell you which note to play and they also tell you how long any given note should last in terms of beats.

Tablature is certainly helpful, but usually only to a point. For example, take a moment and play this for me:

You certainly can handle the notes themselves, but notes are only one part of music. Rhythm is another and it can be very important. How important? Well, suppose I tell you that the example you just played is the first line of the Christmas carol Joy to the World? Did you play it like that the first time? Or did you play it simply, giving each note a single beat? Quite a difference, no?

Since we’re truly only concerned with strumming (for now, anyway), you only have to concern yourself with reading the rhythm aspects of notation. We’ve a number of lessons here at Guitar Noise about this, like Timing is Everything. You might want to take a few moments to look that one over, particularly since it gets into counting and that’s right at the heart of what we’re discussing.

When you count out the beats of the song, you usually do so in terms of quarter notes. We did this in “Example 1″ in Part 1, where you strummed down each quarter note like this:

I’d like to take a moment now to introduce some of you to rhythm notation. Rhythm notation uses just the rhythm part of notation. Instead of writing all the notes of a chord out in notation, a simple slash is stuck at the end of a stem, like this:

These are four quarter notes of the G chord, just as you saw in “Example 2″ a few moments ago. It doesn’t matter in the slightest where on the staff, on whichever line or space, the slash appears. All you’re concerned with is that they are quarter notes. Many music books use rhythm notation without staffs, placing strumming notation above a lyric line.

We’ll use rhythm notation for our next few examples. I’m not going to bother putting a chord in the following examples so you should feel free to use whatever chord you’d like.

Getting back to our quick review of “Part 1,” you also read and saw how when you strum in quarter notes, you’re actually strumming in eighth notes when you take the upstrokes into account:

So far, so good. Now how about if you want to play some more complicated rhythms, maybe something in the style of Jack Johnson, perhaps? He’s actually a great choice because most (if not all) of his music is available in books, which means you don’t have to guess how he strums things, it’s all written down for you!

You may be wondering how that is possible. After all, no one probably went and marked every downstroke or upstroke on the notation. And you’d be perfectly right about that. But if you take a moment and apply your brain, using the information you got in “Part 1,” you’d make some important discoveries.

Suppose you want to play a rhythm where the fastest notes are sixteenth notes? First, you have to think about strumming in eighth notes. Why? Because sixteenth notes are half the value of eighth notes, just like eighth notes are half the value of quarter notes. So if you were to strum a measure of eighth notes with all downstrokes, like this:

That means you’d be strumming in sixteenth notes when you take the upstrokes into account, like this:

Of course, more likely than not, you’re not going to be overly challenged by a rhythm that is either straight eighth notes or straight sixteenth notes. The fun comes when things get a little uneven, such as in strumming something like Jack Johnson’s song, Taylor.  Here’s the riff that gets played pretty much throughout the song:

This looks kind of formidable unless you are able to see it and say, “Hey, that’s all sixteenth notes! Some of them have ties, but they are all sixteenth notes and I can do that!” First, chart all the notes out and ignore the ties. Since the two measures of this riff have the same rhythm, I’m going to just use the first one in the next two examples:

Now, when a note is tied, that means you just play the first of the tied notes and not the second. That means that we miss whatever strum happens to fall on the second of the tied notes, like this:

Instead of the rhythm and the strumming being a total mystery, you’ve got it down perfectly. Let’s try the whole riff:

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That wasn’t hard at all, was it? Not to figure out, anyway! Executing the strumming correctly will take a bit of practice, but nothing you aren’t capable of.

In the chorus sections of Taylor, a second acoustic guitar part comes in playing some open position chords while the first guitar is playing the riff we just worked out. Here is how the strumming of the second guitar looks in notation (rhythm notation this time):

By the way, I’m going to use a regular open position G instead of the “G5″ if that’s okay with you. I just like the sound of it better. Following the same process we just used for the first guitar part, we notice that there is a combination of eighth notes and sixteenth notes here. First, we want to just write out the count, and here’s something very interesting about that – It seems that many notation software programs, particularly those used in guitar books, usually separate out the groups of sixteenth notes or eight notes or dotted eighth and dotted sixteenth notes and what have you, in clusters of single beats. This makes writing out the count a lot easier, as you can see:

Finally, just add in our upstrokes and downstrokes according to where they fall in the count and you’re good to go:

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You’ve gotten quite a bit to digest here, so we’ll save going into even more complicated rhythms for next time.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

There are days when I could use the services of the Sorting Hat. This song lesson, a look at John Prine’s Hello In There, from his eponymous 1971 debut album, could easily be place in the Easy Songs for Beginners section. It’s not really all that hard, once you get the picking pattern into your fingers. And, as always, the picking pattern is simply a guideline. You could come up with all sorts of ways of playing it, even simply strumming instead of picking when you know the chord progression.

But just because this is an “easy intermediate” song, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something (or more than a few somethings) about it. And that’s the whole point of all these lessons here at Guitar Noise, right?

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

Even though I’d heard this song for ages, I didn’t ever play it until the day a friend brought it along to one of the jam sessions we’d have in Chicago. His chord chart showed the song in the key of C, which I assumed was the key that the original recording was in. The first verse, and the chorus, looked like this:

Being a jam session, we obviously had a number of guitarists, so I quickly worked out two “up the neck” transpositions in order to be able to play in a different position and add a bit more to the song. The first was in G (which meant playing with a capo on the fifth fret) and the second was in A (capo on the third fret).

The next time I had the chance to play this was years later, as Hello In There turned up in one of Nick Torres’ songsheet collections. Owing to time, I’m not even sure we gave it a cursory going-over.

But when someone asked for a lesson dealing with a John Prine song, this is the one that came to mind first. And it’s kind of interesting because when I took a look at some recent videos of Prine playing the song, I noticed that he currently (or at least less than two years ago) is playing and singing the song in the key of A. He uses a capo on the second fret and plays open position chords in the key of G.

Now, if I were relying solely on information from the Internet without applying a bit of my brain to it, I might be lost because the majority of the tab / cheat sheets available on the Internet still put the song in C. C certainly may have been the key of the original recording (I don’t have a copy to verify that, sorry), but as people age their vocal range can change and that’s probably why John Prine currently plays it in A.

The point is that even when you know the chords of a song, you may have learned them in a key that’s very hard for you to sing in. And even using a capo may become problematic. For instance, my vocal range is not at all like John Prine’s (and that’s certainly an understatement!). I’m very comfortable singing this song in Eb or even E. That would mean putting a capo on the eighth or ninth fret if I wanted to use the same G based chords that Prine uses. Playing that high up the neck changes the character of the song quite a bit, so I have to take that into account when figuring out how I want to do this as a solo piece.

For now, though, we’re going to first approach this song in the style that John Prine plays it in the various recent live performances you can see and hear on YouTube. That means that we’re going to be playing with G chords but use the capo on the second fret, which puts the song in the key of A. Just so that we understand that we’ve technically got three keys to take into account here, let’s transpose the chords from C to both A and G to make our lives easier (and if you’re in a muddle about how to transpose, take a look at our lesson on that very topic – A Basic Guide to Transposing):

Once we have our pallet of chords, we can take a look at the picking. Prine uses a slow and relatively sparse Travis fingerstyle pattern as a foundation. To begin with, you want to use the thumb to get the bass notes on the beats and then add the treble notes with the fingers. For the G chord, for instance, you’d be playing this:

You can also hit the open G string instead of the open D string in this pattern. In fact, you’ll hear on the various MP3 files that go with this lesson that I will constantly flip between using the D string and the G string, particularly on the fourth beat of any given measure. As we’ve discussed in many articles and song lessons here at Guitar Noise, as long as you have the chord in place with your fingers, it’s rarely going to sound wrong.

In other words, even though I’ve written out the bass part as alternating between the low G (third fret of the low E (sixth) string) and the open D string, you should feel free to use the open G string as an alternate bass note as well. If you worry about being totally mechanical about it, you can lose some of the organic nature of playing. So please remember to use the tablature as a template for your playing and not as some kind of sacred text, okay? And forgive my switching from one to the other in the MP3 files.

In terms of structure, Hello In There is essentially a “verse – chorus” sort of song. The verse, or half the verse depending on the arrangement, also serves as an introduction and can also be played for an interlude between the verses. Both verse and chorus are sixteen measures long and can be broken down into two distinct parts, each eight measures long. This is very helpful because, as you’ll see, the second half of the chorus is almost exactly like the second half of the verse. Half of the verse is also used as the outro, or coda, of the song.

The first half of the verse is a four measure progression (one of G, one of Am and two of D7) that repeats itself (making eight total measures). If you’re confident about having a basic picking pattern down, then it’s time to tackle the first half of the verse:

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The basic Travis picking pattern remains constant throughout the song, but there are little twists to it. For instance, each of the first three chords has a root note on a different string. The low G, as we’ve discussed, is on the low E (sixth) string while the A of the Am is the open A string and the D of the D7 is the open D string. This means you need to shift your thumb accordingly when picking out the bass notes.

The first of the two measures of D7 tosses in a slight embellishment by adding the note of the open high E (first) string. This is a fairly common ornament that guitar players use when playing almost any open position D chord. You can either pick the open string or perform a pull off with your ring finger, which is keeping the second fret of the high E string down for the initial D7 chord.

The last eight measures of the verse involve four chords (Gmaj7, C, G and D), each of which get two measures. When I listened to the video of John Prine performing this song, it seemed to me that he continued to use the open D string as his bass note when he changed to what the chord charts pretty much write as “Gmaj7″ (or Cmaj7 if you go with the key of C charts) and the absence of the G note made the chord sound more like a typical minor chord rather than the jazzy sort of feel of a major seventh chord.

Now if you take a moment to think about it, this makes perfect sense. The notes of Gmaj7 are G, B, D and F# (F# being the major seventh). If you drop out the G, you’ve got B, D and F#, which make up the Bm chord. So playing a “beginner’s Bm” (xx0432) works wonderfully here, and also allows you to mimic the take-the-finger-off-the-high-E-string ornamentation that you used with the D chord:

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And since we’re having some fun dropping notes to open up the D string, how about turning around and adding a note, say adding the G chord at the third fret of the high E string during the C chord? That’s what’s going on in the first measure of C.

For the measures of G, I move the treble part of the picking down to the B and G strings, just to do something different than what we played for the first G chord. There’s nothing too fancy about that. Occasionally, he will hammer on the open low E string to get the bass note (G at the third fret) and you will hear me do that on occasion as well. I marked it on the second measure of G in the notation / tablature so you could see it, but you should feel free to use it at your discretion. Or not use it at all, if you prefer.

Another thing I picked up from listening to Prine’s video is that he uses F# (found at the second fret of the low E string) as the bass note for D chord, making it D/F# if you prefer. And if you take a look at him playing you’ll see that he wraps his thumb over the top of the neck of the guitar to get this note. He also does a hammer-on with the open G string to get the A note at the second fret. This is shown at the very beginning of the second measure of D in the notation / tablature of this last example.

A quick note here to point out that I should have stopped after the two measures of D/F# and not gone on to play the G chord at the end of that last MP3 example. Lost my place, I’m afraid! Hope you’ll forgive me.

Putting both parts of the verse together (and it is the verse and not the “full chorus,” as I mistakenly announce on the following MP3 example) will sound like this:

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That F# in the D/F# is something you can decide not to play. It won’t be all that different if you use a regular D chord instead. You will have to change your picking accordingly, though. But the real purpose of the F# is in how it leads your ear around and tricks you when the chorus comes up. Before the chorus, you’ll hear this F# in the bass three times – once in the Introduction, where it leads you to G; at the end of the first half of the verse, where it again leads you to G; and finally at the end of the verse. And your ear is, naturally, expecting to go to G again.

But instead he lowers the F# to F and plays an F chord. And the first eight measures of the chorus simply switch between F and G:

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You can play this F as a full barre if you’d like. Prine plays it as another “wrap-around” chord, using his thumb for the F at the first fret of the low E, his index at the first fret of the B string, middle finger on the second fret of the G, pinky on the third fret of the D and ring finger on the third fret of the A string. He doesn’t worry about the high E string because he’s not picking it on either the F or the G chord.

You could, if you wanted to, simply slide this “wrap-around F” chord (13321x) up two frets to get the following G. It will sound essentially the same.

The second half of the chorus is, as mentioned earlier, pretty much a copy of the second half of the verse, but with an additional four measures of G tacked on to the end:

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Now let’s put both half of the chorus together:

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And that’s pretty much the whole song. Here’s a chord sheet to help you see your way through:

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As I mentioned earlier, choosing a key to play a song, or choosing a capo placement for that matter (since it’s just a way of playing in a different key in a different place for different chord voicings on the neck) in is an essential part of how the song is going to sound. You’ve just heard the two main parts of the song, the verse and the chorus, played in A but using “key of G” chords and having the capo on the second fret. Here is another version, this time using open position chords in the key of A. With your permission, I’m not going to tab out the guitar part. There’s no sense to since it’s basically the same exact picking pattern we’ve been using all along. You will need the chords, though:

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As I mentioned, these are basic, simple open position chords. Bm7 serves as an easy substitute for a barre chord-style Bm and allows me to use the bass note (B at the second fret of the A string). I do use some hammer-ons, such as hammering from the open B string to the second fret while playing the regular A chord, and also throw in the D note at the third fret of the B string on the E7 on occasion.

In this key, it would have been easier for me to use Amaj7 (x02120) instead of C#m, but I chose instead to use an easy voicing of C#m7, x46600, with my index finger playing the fourth fret of the A string, my ring finger on the sixth fret of the D and my pinky on the sixth fret of the G string. That allows me to slide the fingers, keeping the shape, up one fret and playing D 6/9 (x57700), which sounds very cool. An even easier substitution would be Dadd9 (xx0770) and I play that at least once in the verse.

Finally, I make use of the open, ringing B and high E strings by playing an Aadd9 (x07600) for the final chord. That may seem tricky, but actually it’s another easy chord change because the Aadd9 is essentially the same shape as the open E chord that precedes it. You simply slide the shape up to the sixth and seventh frets and remove your finger from the A string. Voila!

You can hear that even though this version is in the same key as the first one we did, it has its own feel to it. Is one arrangement better than the other? No, they are simply different, that’s all. Instead of thinking of which one is “right,” why not listen to them both played together:

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This is an excellent example of how two guitars playing exactly the same fingerpicking pattern can still produce depth and harmony simply by using different chord voicings. And the voicings don’t have to be all that far away from each other on the neck.

One of the things I’d like to start exploring with some of the lessons here at Guitar Noise is how to put together multiple guitar arrangements. Hopefully, this will give you a taste for what you might hear. At the very least, you’ve learned a terrific song by a great songwriter. Roger Waters stated in a 2008 interview that John Prine wrote “just extra-ordinarily eloquent music – and he lives on that plane with Neil Young and Lennon.”

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

We’ll be talking a lot about rhythms in the various lessons and articles coming to Guitar Noise in 2010 and one thing you’re going to read over and over again is that rhythm is aural. Whether it’s the fact that we do everything on computers nowadays or that we feel something is positively ancient because there is no video attached to it, it’s vital to remember that music is audio. And as much as you want to think of various aspects of music in visual terms, you have to develop your ears and even occasionally forget your eyes entirely if you truly want to get better at playing guitar and at making music.

When it comes to learning music, the most important thing that you can use your eyes for is reading. But that’s just the first step of many. Being able to read tablature or music notation (and, ideally, you want to be good at reading both) won’t help you if you don’t apply your brain to your reading.

Hopefully, this lesson on Jack Johnson’s Banana Pancakes will help you understand the importance of both these points. Plus, it will give you some more work with easy forms of barre chords (something we all need, beginners or not). Don’t worry, though – you’ll also have the choice of playing this song (almost) entirely without barre chords, if you so choose.

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

Structure and Rhythm

Breaking down Banana Pancakes in terms of musical structure doesn’t take long. The song is in the key of G, it’s in 4 / 4 timing (at a tempo between 112 and 120 beats per minute, if I’m not mistaken) and there is a short introduction that uses (as you’ll soon see) a very simple riff and flits between two chords – Am7 and G7 twice before very briefly using D7 as a “turnaround” chord to get us to the first verse. The verses are made up of a four-chord progression (G7, D7, Am7, and C7) where each chord gets two beats. This progression is played four times and then we have a chorus that is conveniently the same musical structure of the introduction.

Verse and chorus then are repeated, although the second chorus is twice as long as the first one. This extended part of the chorus doesn’t contain the riffs of the first one (or the introduction). Then we have a bridge that has two measures each of Am7, D, Am7, D, and Bm7 followed by single measures of Em, C, G, and D7 and then a measure-and-a- half of G before another two-beat turn around on D7 to take us back to the last verse and chorus. The final chorus, like the second chorus, is twice the length of the first chorus.

As good as all this information is, the first thing you truly need to know about this song is that it is played in swing eighths. Swing rhythm is something that is close to impossible for most people to pick up visually. Why? Because if you are watching the “down and up” strokes of a guitarist, the strumming looks identical to strumming regular eighth notes. Unless you’re listening (and, preferably, counting), you may not catch it.

Even written sheet music doesn’t always tell you that something is in swing rhythm. Usually it will be written out just as regular eighth notes. Here is a simplified version of the opening riff of Banana Pancakes written out for you (I’ve taken out the frills – don’t worry, you’ll get the “real” thing in a moment!) and played in both regular (or “straight”) eighth notes and then again in swing. I’m also counting along so that you can hear the difference:

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Straight eighths divide a beat evenly. You count them “one and two and three and four and…” In swing eighths, the beat is divided evenly into three parts (a triplet), but you play just the first and the last note of that triplet. In other words, you would count out “one and a two and a three and a four and a” but only play the numbers and the “a”s, not the “and”s.

If you want to get a good primer to swing rhythms, listen to Guitar Noise Podcast # 13. All of the music notation for this lesson will be written like “regular” eighth notes but you want to think of them in terms of swing eighths. One of the reasons that sheet music is written this way is to make the life of whoever’s writing the notation a little easier! Scribbling out all those triplets is a royal pain!

Introduction, Basic Barres and Reading Finger Position Clues

Barre chords are a signature part of Jack Johnson’s sound. You won’t produce the jazz-styled chord voicings and chunky rhythmic sounds he gets without them. And the barre chords involved in Banana Pancakes are, for the most part, very easy. This is one reason why it’s a great song to use for barre chord practice.

The Introduction / Chorus section of Banana Pancakes introduces the Am7 and G7 chords you will run into throughout the song. Both of these chords are what we’d call “E shaped” barre chords. The Am7 is an Em7 (020000) moved up to the fifth and seventh frets (575555) and the G7 is an E7 (020100) moved up to the third, fourth and fifth frets (353433). For both chords, you want to barre the appropriate fret with your index finger, then use your ring finger to get the note on the A string and your middle finger to get the note on the G string. If you’re careful about how you strum, you can get away with not fingering the A string at all. Just miss it when you strum either chord. This is especially easy to do on the upstrokes and, conveniently enough, you’ll be playing these chords mostly on the upstrokes. Here’s the Introduction, except for the very last measure:

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If you’re going to go with the barre chords, then it’s important to let the fingering of the barre chord help you determine how to go about fingering the riff. Since the first riff ends with the Am7 barre chord, you want to make the first slide (usually done from the fifth fret, even though it’s not indicated) with the ring finger. Sliding the ring finger up to the seventh fret puts you in great position to use your index finger for the notes at the fifth fret and also lets you use the index finger for the slide from the fifth fret to the third fret later in the measure. Using your index finger for the slide that begins the second measure ensures you are in a good position to make the Am7 barre chord. You hit the A note (fifth fret of the low E (sixth) string on the first beat and strum down on the second beat with your fingers not quite in place, just off the strings enough to mute them, and then set the chord in place and strum it on the following upstroke.

And just how did I decide on where to put the upstrokes and downstrokes? Well, from listening to Banana Pancakes and from counting out the rhythm while listening to it, I realized that all the strumming was done in either quarter notes (one per beat) or eighth notes (two per beat, done with “swing” as we’ve already discussed). And when dealing with measures of eighth notes, the easiest way to play them is using a downstroke on the beat and an upstroke for the eighth note that falls between the beat, like this:

Again, I can’t stress enough how rhythm is best learned through listening and feel. The temptation is to make it out to be a lot harder than it really is. Read through our lessons on basic strumming, like Getting Past Up and Down and others that you will find on our “Strumming for Beginners” section that you can access through the “Hot Lessons” page. And be on the lookout for a new strumming lesson that will feature a bit of the Jack Johnson song, Taylor. This should be up online before the end of January 2010.

Meanwhile, this particular fingering pattern for the first riff in the “Introduction / Chorus” section, as well as the rhythm pattern itself, repeats for the next riff and the following G7 chord. The third riff, which is followed by another Am7 chord, is a slight variation of the first two, using more notes on the A string, but your fingers should still be in position to get the notes at the fifth fret with your index finger and the notes at the seventh fret with your ring finger. The last riff and the following G7 chord are clones of the second pass through the Introduction.

The last measure of the Introduction involves a chord change from G7 to D7 and also gives a great demonstration of how easy, yet complicated, a simple eighth note strumming pattern can sound:

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There are two aspects of this to work on. The first is the fingering and the changing between the chords. This D7 chord is based on the open position C7 shape (x32310), in fact it’s just a C7 chord moved two frets up the neck. We’ve seen it most recently in the Holiday Song Lesson on Away in a Manger. It’s a cool chord because if you hit the open high E (first) string by accident, you’ve got a D9 chord, which usually will work as a substitute, particularly in blues-y and jazz type songs.

More important, moving between the G (or G7) barre chord we’ve been using and this D7 chord is actually something that you’ll run into a lot. Why? Well, in the key of G, G is the “I” or the root chord. D, or D7 in this case, is the “V” chord, and the I – V or V- I chord progressions are some of the most common ones found in songs of all types.

And (almost as if someone planned it that way) making this switch isn’t all that hard, although it will take some concentrated practice to get it smooth. What makes it relatively easy is that your fingers, when in the G or G7 barre chord position, are either where you want them to be for the D7 or close enough that you don’t have to move all that far. Your ring finger, sitting on the fifth fret of the A string, doesn’t move at all. The index finger goes from laying flat on the third fret to standing up in place on the third fret of the B string. Meanwhile your middle finger shifts from the fourth fret of the G string to the fourth fret of the D string. Simply add your pinky to the fifth fret of the G string and you’re there!

Take some time just switching between these two chord shapes. Start slowly at first, making certain that your fingers are ending up exactly where you want them to be. Then work on moving your fingers together as a unit. For some great tips on practicing chord changes, check out Tom Hess’ recent article on this very topic – Teaching Chords.

The second aspect, getting the rhythm right, will also require practice, persistence and patience on your part. The measure starts out with a rest, but you want to make certain you make the downward motion of the strum during that rest (the whole “sock puppet” thing again) so that you’re in place for the upstroke. You’ll hear me counting this all out very slowly on the MP3, so hopefully that will help you to get the timing into your head.

Verses, More Rhythms and Open Chord Substitutions

Believe it or not, you’ve pretty much got the song down at this point. The verses, as detailed earlier, a simple two measure progression that repeats four times:

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There are some fun (and slightly sneaky!) things going on here. First, the rhythm is the same one in “Example 3″ from the “Sock Puppet” lesson mentioned earlier. You hit the root note of the chord on the first and third beats (the quarter notes) and then strum down and up for the eighth notes that occur during the second and fourth beats. Remember that it’s still in swing rhythm and you’ll be fine!

The upstroke on the chord (on the second half of both the second and fourth beats) is a muted catch of the strings. This is very cool because that’s where you want to be making the chord change anyway, so the string muting actually helps you to cover up getting your fingers set! Told you it was a bit sneaky!

As promised, you can also do this part, not to mention the whole song, almost entirely without barre chords. I say “almost” because I do think you might like the “easy partial barre” voicing of Am7, which it to barre only the four high strings at the fifth fret. You can use the open A string for your root note, since it is, after all, A.

In the MP3 file for the last example, you can hear me playing it both ways. I play a regular G instead of the G7 but I like the voicing of D7 we’ve been using so I’ve kept that. And I also like the Am7 so I use the “easy partial barre” I just described and follow up with a regular open position C7. You can certainly use a regular open position Am7 (x02010) if you’d like. And, as you can hear, there’s not enough difference between the open position chords and the barre chords worth worrying about. Not to mention that if you’re trying to sing the lyrics and play the song at the same time you may find the open chords a little easier.

But the barre chords are not all that hard, either. You’ve already been practicing the G7 to

D7 shift, so you should be okay with that one. If you make use of the “easy partial barre” form of Am7 and use your ring finger to barre the strings at the fifth fret, then you never have to shift your index finger from the third fret for the entire chord progression since the C7 barre uses the open position A7 shape with a barre at the third fret. You probably never thought barre chords could be so much fun!

Choruses, Extended Choruses, Bridge and Bonus Riff

The final C7 of the verse goes to Am7 instead of G, signaling the start of the chorus. The first chorus is pretty much like the Introduction but without the first riff (because we begin at the Am7) and a slightly different rhythm:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Here the rhythm is still all eighth notes (and by this point I don’t have to say “swing,” do I?) and the root note is still played on the first and third beat, but the chords themselves are on the offbeat, so they are played with upstrokes while the string muting takes place on the second and fourth beats. Keep your upstrokes short and don’t forget to keep your strumming in motion during the muting and you’ll find this isn’t at all difficult. It’s when you start thinking about it, when you try to visualize it, that the rhythm tends to falter. Try it with your eyes closed – that often helps!

The last measure of the first chorus is exactly like the last measure of the Introduction, but with a G note in the bass (played at the third fret of the low E (sixth) string) instead of an eighth rest. And yes, you can use open position chords just as well here, as you can in the Introduction.

This latest rhythm, with the chords on the offbeat (upstrokes) is also used to extend the second (and third) chorus, and the bridge as well. The extended choruses are just two extra sets of chord changes – two measures of Am7, two measures of G7, two more measures of Am7 and two of G (355433 for a full barre).

The bridge starts out by switching between Am7 and an A-shaped barre of the D chord (x5777x), played with a bit of an alternating bass line:

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A-shaped barre chords, especially straight major ones (no 7’s, 9’s, etc.,) can be a real pain. Many people tend to cheat on them a little – barring the first set of strings across the first five strings with the index finger and barring the second set (two frets higher) across the first four strings with the ring finger. The thing to remember when playing these this way is to not strum the high E (first) string.

Things get more interesting starting at the fifth line of the bridge with the Bm7 chord. This is an open position Am7 chord that’s been moved up two frets and barred across the second fret with the index finger. Your middle finger gets the third fret of the B string and your ring finger sits at the fourth fret of the D string.

You then slide this entire shape up the neck so that your index finger barres the seventh fret (your middle finger with be on the eighth fret of the B string and your ring finger on the ninth fret of the D string) and add your pinky to the ninth fret of the G string. This is the Em chord that starts the sixth line of the bridge. To get the Em/D# (and for more on slash chords, check out the Easy Songs for Beginners’ Lesson on Eleanor Rigby), keep your middle, ring and pinky fingers in place and slide the index down a fret so it sits at the sixth fret of the A string. You then reform another A major-shaped barre chord at the third and fifth frets to make C (x3555x).

This is a good place to mention that open position chords work very well on the bridge section of Banana Pancakes. Because Jack Johnson doesn’t strike his high E string for the D, Em and C chords, his chord voicings are very similar to the open position chords you know and love. So if you have decided to play totally without barre chords or would simply just like a bit of a respite from them, feel free to use these substitutes:

You’ve probably already noticed that the bridge ends with the exact same G to D7 turnaround that you’ve encountered twice already in this song.

Okay, one last thing: In the original recording, Johnson occasionally plays a very short riff (lick, flourish, whatever you’d like to call it) in place of the C7 chord during the verses. He uses it in place of the fourth C7 in the first verse, doesn’t use it at all in the second and then uses it in place of the second C7 in the last verse. It goes like this:

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This is one of those instances where your brain can help you out a lot. Even though the riff takes the place of the C7 chord, it is still based on the Am barre chord, so don’t lose your fingering! Slide your ring finger from the fifth fret of the A string to the seventh fret, then pick both the D and G strings, where your index finger is still barring the fifth fret. Then hammer onto the seventh fret of the D string with your ring finger and pull it off again to sound the note at the fifth fret. As long as you keep your index finger on the fifth fret (after the initial slide on the A string), you should be fine.

You can almost do this verbatim with open position chords, but instead of sliding on the A string, you need to hammer onto the second fret of the D string after initially striking it as an open string.

And there you have all the parts! Here’s the layout for you and you’ll have to forgive my not giving you the usual final MP3 file. I’m pretty sure that after all the explaining, not to mention all the MP3 examples, you can handle this without problems.

I hope that you have enjoyed this song lesson and I also hope that you find it a great way to get going on refining your playing of barre chords, not to mention working on some simple rhythm skills.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Case in point – this lesson on the old Christmas carol Away in a Manger started out as a very simple lesson on melody movement, but, well, you’ll see!

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

Away in a Manger is a beguiling, simple yet beautiful melody built on a descending major scale line, but starting on the fifth note of the scale. In the key of G, it would be like this:

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When I was working this out, I was indeed playing in G. This led me to thinking, what if I raised the melody up an octave so that I could play it mostly (almost entirely, in fact) on the high E (first) string and then use the open B, G and D strings as a drone, kind of making the guitar more into a dulcimer. That turned out like this:

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I liked this a lot, especially since it opened up some many possibilities for concentrating on the single notes of the melody. One could, for instance, use a single finger and slide from note to note. Or you could place your index finger on the B note at the seventh fret of the high E (first) string and set up the C note (eighth fret) with the middle finger and the opening D at the tenth fret with the pinky and then using pull-offs to sound the first three notes of the melody. Being able to focus on the tone of each note of the melody, how playing it even with different fingers creates a different tone, can keep me occupied for hours!

As much as I enjoyed being able to play around with the melody, I found myself missing having a low G note in the bass. But the thought of trying to have one finger on the G note at third fret of the low E (sixth) string while simultaneously playing the D note at the tenth fret of the high E (first) string, well, let’s just say that I didn’t think it being a good idea and leave it at that.

But there are all sorts of ways of getting around these kinds of challenges if you have an open mind. Since I wanted to have a low G note for my bass, why not tune my low E up to G just for this song and give myself nothing but open strings for my bass accompaniment, like this:

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Now, you might wonder why I didn’t tune my A string down to G instead, and you certainly can do that. But I was worried about the fact that, Away in a Manger being in the key of G, the song would primarily contain G, C and D chords and tuning the A down to G would make the C chord problematic, whereas changing the low E string wouldn’t change the C chord at all.

Away in a Manger, like many songs, has four lines and the melody line of the first and third lines are the same. Let’s tackle that first line with our newly tuned guitars:

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You’ll notice that I changed the accompaniment in the third measure, using the C note at the third fret of the A string as the first bass note but not changing the other two notes. Technically, this creates a Cadd9 chord instead of a regular C, but I liked the way it sounded, slightly dissonant but in an interesting way. After trying out using regular C and this one, I ended up liking the open D string much more.

Although I didn’t realize it at time, keeping the A string tuned to A made the first full measure of the second line much easier to deal with:

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This is simply a C7 chord (x32310) slid up two frets, creating a D9 chord (x54530) and the use of the F# (fourth fret of the D string) and C (fifth fret of the G string), mixing with the ringing tones of the D (third fret of the B string) and E (open high E (sixth) string) in the melody, makes this sound much more interesting than if I’d used a regular D with just the open high E string (xx0230).

The “regular” open position D chord does have its place, though, as it’s the perfect choice for the second measure. Some people might find this measure easier to play by making a partial barre at the second fret, covering the three high strings with the index finger. Doing so should allow you to play the initial D note (third fret of the B string) of the melody with the middle finger and the A note (fifth fret of the high E (first) string) with the pinky.

Using a partial barre also puts you in a position to simply stand up your index finger onto the second fret of the D string for the Cadd9 chord (x32030) in the following measure. The middle finger would get the C note in the bass (third fret of the A string) and the ring finger would play the D note at the third fret of the B string. You would then slide that finger up to the eighth fret to get the G note of the melody and hang onto it so that it could ring out while you play the B note (seventh fret of the high E) to end this phrase.

Since the melody of the third line is an exact copy of the first line, I thought it might be nice to do something different this time around. Adding a bit of additional harmony is always nice:

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These are basic double stops, and shouldn’t give you too much trouble provided you remember to keep the G note of the melody (eighth fret of the B string) the same while changing the harmony note from F (tenth fret of the G string) to E (ninth fret of the G string). And you don’t have to release the B note (fourth fret of the G string) in favor of the open G string if you prefer not to. This was something I thought was nice.

The final line has a few slightly complicated challenges to it involving a few partial barres:

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Begin the first measure here with your index finger barring the first four strings at the fifth fret. This, along with the open A string in the bass, gives you an Am7 chord for your harmony. Your pinky should be able to reach the C note of the melody (eighth fret of the high E) without difficulty and you can use either your ring finger or your middle finger to get the B note (seventh fret) that follows.

You remove the barre in the second measure but replace it, this time using your middle finger to barre, in the third measure. That frees your index finger for the F# note at the fourth fret of the D string. This chord, x04555, is D9/A by the way. Use your ring finger or pinky to get the F# note at the seventh fret of the B string and then slide that finger up a single fret to play the final G of the melody line.

Okay, let’s put this all together, shall we?

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I hope you’ve enjoyed working out this Christmas carol with me. Even though it’s fairly simple, I think we’ve managed to come up with an arrangement with some flair of its own.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

And that’s just as well, too, for there are certainly more than enough versions of just about every single holiday song known to civilization. Today, I’d like to offer up a “fingerstyle / chord melody” take on I’ll Be Home for Christmas, a song from the 1940’s that’s been sung by almost everyone, it seems. Hopefully our Guitar Noise arrangement will become part of your holiday song repertoire.

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

Before we start in, though, I have to digress slightly concerning two things. First, I’ve been playing this song for ages, but when I first started to work up an arrangement of it, I had no sheet music as a guide. Instead, I relied on memories of the various versions I’d heard. As a result, there are all sorts of ‘freedoms” taken, particularly with the time signatures in this arrangement. But I’m hoping that will make it an even more interesting lesson.

The second thing is that I incorporate the “verse” of the song, and you may not even be aware that it exists. We know many pop songs from the middle of the 1900s simply from their choruses, which actually seem to be whole songs. But quite often, these songs had a single verse that served more as what we’d think of today as an introduction. Then everyone would join in on singing the chorus. And, more often than not these days, it’s only the chorus that most of us know.

Our arrangement of I’ll Be Home is in the key of A. And though the song is written in 4/4 timing, we’re going to be approaching it in a different manner. In 4/4 timing, the two lines of the verse goes like this:

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Back when I was putting this all together, the phrase of lyric gave me a strong impression of 3 / 4 timing. More like this:

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Because I’d gotten this rhythm into my head all those many years ago, I pretty much think of the whole song in terms of threes and triplets instead of fours, as you’ll see when we get to the chorus.

For now, though, let’s take a look at those first two lines again, done up in a “fingerstyle chord melody” way:

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First things first – I’ve moved the melody up an octave to place it totally on the first two strings of guitar. This means that you’ll have a bit of work ahead, changing chords at various places on the fretboard. But even this early in the verse, we’ll be running into two important chord shapes that will recur throughout the song. The initial Dmaj7 chord is made by placing the index finger at the ninth fret of the high E (first) string, and then forming a diagonal line with your middle finger on the tenth fret of the B string and your ring finger on the eleventh fret of the G string. The open D string serves as our bass note.

We then switch to full-barre Em7 chord shapes for the next three measures. Using this fingering of barring across all the strings with the index finger and then adding the ring finger to the A string two frets up, we create C#m7 (barre at ninth fret, ring finger on the eleventh fret of the A string), Bm7 (barre at seventh fret, ring finger on the ninth fret of the A string), and F#m7 (barre at second fret, ring finger on the fourth fret of the A string) and our free fingers to get the other melody notes. Your index finger will easily reach the tenth fret of the B string when playing the C#m and your pinky should have no problems with either the tenth fret of the B when playing Bm7 or the fourth fret of the high E (first) string when playing the F#m7.

The “diagonal line shape” of the Dmaj7 chord shows up again in first measure of the second line for the Bm7/D chord, although you may not immediately recognize it. Before you worry about playing the notes shown in the tablature, set your fingers for a typical “beginner’s Bm” chord – index finger on the second fret of the high E (first) string, middle finger on the third fret of the B string, and ring finger on the fourth fret of the G string. Once you’ve gotten those fingers in place, then put your pinky on the fifth fret of the high E (first) string to get the A note of the melody line. Once you’ve played it, you simply remove the pinky and all your other fingers are in place for the last chord of that measure.

Being able to read chord shapes as tablature is not something that many guitarists pick up easily and we’ll be spending a bit of time throughout 2010 working through this subject. Hopefully, though, this shows you why it’s an important skill to develop.

Recognizing chord shapes can often make changing from chord to chord easier as well. For instance, just looking at the chord charts and tablature for switching from this “beginner’s Bm” to the following E7 may seem daunting, all it really involves is moving two fingers. Your middle and ring finger are already where they should be, so you shift the index finger to the second fret of the D string and then drop your pinky onto the fourth fret of the high E (first) string.

If you want to add a bit more bass, you can also flatten out your index finger across the second fret of both the D and A strings, giving you the fingering of 022434, which allows you to play the chord across all six strings. You want to be careful with this, though as you need the note of the open high E (first) string as part of the melody line. You can achieve this by tilting the index finger into the middle of the fretboard, clearing the first string completely, or you could always reach the same note at the fifth fret of the B string with you pinky.

The second half of the verse starts out the same but then finishes with a group of interesting chords, not to mention a brief change of time signatures:

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Something both cool but somewhat frustrating and unnerving about is that any one specific combination of notes can turn out to be a part of many, many possible chords. If I were to give you the notes C, E and G, as an example, you could say that they are a C major chord, but they could also be part of Am7 (A, C, E and G), Fmaj9 (F, A, C, E and G) or many other chords. Most jazz players use only three or four strings in order to create chords, so there are all sorts of ways to identify them.

Since Bm, or Bm7 if you will, is the focal harmonic point of the first measure in the second line here, I’ve named each of these chords as extensions of Bm or B. Shifting from chord to chord may seem difficult at first, but using your index finger as an anchor on the lowest fret and shifting it up the neck (from the second fret to the fourth and then to the seventh) will help you make smooth transitions. Having your index finger on the seventh fret for the B13 also puts you in perfect position for the E9.

This part of the verse can be done very freely in terms of timing. You can make it incredibly melodramatic if you’d like, especially if doing so helps you buy time between the chord changes!

Part of the charm of this arrangement, of most chord melody style arrangements for that matter, are getting ringing strings and overtones wherever possible. That’s why you’ll find many times I’ll opt for a chord voicing involving open strings when I can.

With the “verse” out of the way, we can concentrate on the “chorus” part of I’ll Be Home for Christmas, which is the part you’re probably really interested in, anyway. Like the verse, the original chorus is written in 4 /4 timing. But while there is a strong pulse on each beat, and again this is to my ears and may not work for you, there is also a distinct feel for triplets in the accompaniment. It’s got the same kind of feel as The House of the Rising Sun. So I’ve worked out the chorus in 6 / 8 timing to accommodate this feel. If nothing else, it keeps me from writing out a lot of triplet notation!

I could have just as easily written this out in 12 / 8, the way many blues songs are written out, but I simply found 6 / 8 more convenient. And, as you’ll see and hear, it does make coming up with an easy, yet interesting accompaniment a breeze.

Essentially, the chorus can be broken down into four parts, each of which goes with a line of lyric:

I’ll be home for Christmas you can count on me
Please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree
Christmas Eve will find me where the lovelight gleams
I’ll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams

To make matters even easier, the first and third lines are, essentially identical in terms of melody and chords. So we’ve only three parts to learn! Here’s the first:

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The first measure involves what some people call the “classical guitarist’s A chord,” although folks like Pete Townsend use it a lot. Essentially, it’s a partial barring of the second fret, covering the four high strings with the index finger, and then adding the pinky to the fifth fret of the high E (first) string to get the A note of the melody. You then slide the pinky down to the fourth fret at the end of the measure.

For the most part, I tried to make the accompaniment be a simple “down and up” arpeggio, again much like the lesson on The House of the Rising Sun. There will be places where this will have to be changed, but if you can get used to starting with your bass note and (including that bass note) play three strings down and then three strings back up, you should be fine.

An Adim7 sets the stage for the second measure. Slide your index finger, still barring the first four strings, up to the fourth fret and add your middle finger to the fifth fret of the G string while dropping your pinky onto the seventh fret of the high E (first) string. Use your ring finger to fret the A note at the fifth fret of the high E later in the measure.

The E note of the open first string is the melody note for the word “Christmas,” so I use most of the barre chord version of the Bm chord but leave that first string open. This is actually fairly easy to do if you don’t think of it as a barre chord, but rather as an Am chord slid up two frets. Plus, then your fingers are in shape for the E chord that comes next.

If case one of the subtle subtexts of the many lessons here at Guitar Noise may be eluding you, let me make it clear: you don’t have to let chord names freak you out. There is very little about music that you can’t figure out, provided that you keep your head and don’t panic. For instance, you may look at the chord in the next measure, C#m7(b5) and have a heart attack. But there’s no reason for it. C#m is C#, E and G#. Adding the “7″ means adding the note, B, to the chord. “b5″ indicates that you lower the fifth of the chord, G# in this instance, a half-step, turning it into G. So the notes of “C#7(b5) are C#, E, G and B. That’s three open strings plus a C# thrown in somewhere. No reason whatsoever to panic that I can see.

You could make this more interesting, not to mention slightly harder to finger by going with a fingering of X42000, but since you’re fingerpicking arpeggios, make it easier on yourself by skipping the D string entirely.

Likewise, the following chord, F#7(b9) may seem unwieldy, but all you’ve got to do is to barre across the second fret again with your index finger and then add your middle finger to the third fret of the G string and your ring finger, just for a moment, to the third fret of the high E (first) string. Then you only need stand the index finger up at the second fret of the A string to put you in perfect position for the Bm7 of the last two measures.

Let’s move along to the second line of the chorus:

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Things start our relatively easy, with three simple open positions before moving up the neck for the F#m7 in the fourth measure. But even this isn’t that hard if you stop to think and prepare for a moment. The chord immediately before it, Amaj7, shares the same shape and fingering on the B, G and D strings, so if you set yourself up to play that Amaj7 without your index finger (pinky on the second fret of the B string, middle finger on the first fret of the G string and ring finger on the second fret of the D string), then you only need slide the whole shape up to the sixth and seventh frets and drop your index finger down on the fifth fret of the high E string to complete the chord.

And if you plan out your arpeggios, you don’t have to play the whole B7 barre chord, either. For all intents and purposes, you can get away with leaving the A string clear (other than the index finger needed to barre the seventh fret, of course!) and just use your middle finger on the eighth fret of the G string. Plus your ring finger for the melody note at the ninth fret of the B string when it comes along. The last two measures of this section are a repeat of the third and fourth measures of the first line.

After repeating the first line again, you’ve only one more to go:

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This brings us back to the two basic chord shapes we covered in the “verse” section. The Bm7 (based on the Em7 shape but barred at the seven fret) we remember as the third chord of the song. The “diagonal line” chord is played across the fifth, sixth and seventh frets of the high E (first), B and G strings, respectively, to create Dm. Adding the pinky to the seventh fret of the high E (first) string will give you the melody note.

Then comes our old friend C#m7(b5) and since that’s nowhere near as scary now, why not try stretching our hand a bit and using the x42000 fingering for it? Follow that up with a full F#7 (index finger barred across the second fret, middle finger on the third fret of the G and ring finger on the fourth fret of the A), another Bm7 and another diagonal Dm and you’re just about finished. We’ll close with a nice open string version of Amaj9, fingering the sixth fret of both the D and G strings.

If you want to have an ending with a little more pizzazz, try replacing the final two measures with a reprise of the first four measures of the “verse” section, only try it in 6 /8 timing to give it a little more interest. I’ve not tabbed this out, but I play it in our final version. And just in case you were wondering, I’m playing all the MP3 examples for this lesson on a classical guitar.

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As always, I hope that you had fun with this arrangement of I’ll Be Home for Christmas. It’s one of my favorite seasonal songs and I hope you enjoy it as well. It may take you a little longer to get confident about playing it, but I’m sure you’ll manage it with just a little bit of practice, patience and perseverance.

And, again as always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Good songs, like any works of art, are multi-dimensional. They have layers that don’t reveal themselves on a first listen. It’s only after repeated exposure that you even begin to glimpse a hint of the various parts and start to hear how they all work together. This is one reason why coming up with single guitar arrangements for songs is both frustrating and also immensely satisfying.

Sailing to Philadelphia, from the 2000 album of the same name by Mark Knopler, could be a poster child for this philosophy. At a casual first listen, it’s a wonderful fingerstyle acoustic guitar song punctuated with some typically tasteful (and tasty) electric guitar fills and solos that Knopfler makes sound so easy. But, as you’ll see and hear, even the relatively straightforward sounding acoustic guitar part is an adventure in itself!

So let’s get started, shall we?

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

If you’ve never heard this song before, you should go look it up on YouTube and give it a listen. It’s a narrative between two people, Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason, surveyors from England who mapped out the Pennsylvania / Maryland border in the 1700’s. The original recording is done as a duet between Mark Knopfler (singing Dixon’s part) and James Taylor (who gets Mason’s lines).

Structurally speaking, Sailing to Philadelphia is a fairly standard song format. There’s a very short introduction of eight measures and then there’s a verse. Or two verses, if you prefer to think of it that way, since each vocalist gets an identical amount of time and space. Then there’s a chorus and a short solo over a repeat of the introduction chord progression. Then a second verse (or two verses) and chorus, although this second chorus is slightly elongated, and then the song fades out over an extended guitar solo played over repeated cycling of the introduction chord progression.

On the original recording, this song is in the key of A. And you’ll find this verified in that most of the Internet tabs you’ll find for it are like this one:

Some have taken the liberty of working it up in the key of G, putting a capo on the second fret in order to bring the chords back up to the original key of A:

And these chords whether in A or G work fine. But listening to the acoustic guitar you can hear that something is not quite spot on. There are additional notes added to these chords, slightly embellishing them. Listening carefully, I could hear that the highest strings never changed notes, creating a ringing and mesmerizing repeated use of B and C# (the B note played at the fourth fret of the G string because the B string was fretted at the second fret to produce C#) while the high E string rang open. So the actual notes and the chords, using the first four measures of the introduction as an example, were more like this:

At this point in the process, I was in a bit of a dilemma – thrilled at figuring out this much so far but more than a bit apprehensive that I’d run into a song I wasn’t going to be able to play. Using these chords in these fingerings was going to be awkward if not downright painful.

So I thought about using a capo and playing in G, but that created other issues:

Because the ringing notes in the G became A, B and D, it was impossible to get them all on adjoining strings in order to get that hypnotic effect the original recording had. Or at least it seemed impossible until I started to think about it some more. After all, someone else had done it on the original recording!

Getting ringing A and B notes in combination weren’t a problem. Getting B and D or A and D in combination also was simply a matter of playing at the right place. But getting all three notes required more than thought, it required retuning! By tuning my high E string down a full step to D (making the tuning, from low to high EADGBD), I could get all three notes ringing across the three high strings, just as I did in the key of A but without the contortionist chords. So the first four measures of the introduction could be played like this:

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Definitely sounds like the original, no? But we’re still not totally out of the woods yet, as there are fingering issues that will have to be dealt with because of the new tuning, and I haven’t even mentioned the surprises coming up in the time signature (!), but I think we’re ready to go!

The Introduction

Truth be told, I could sit and play the first four bars of the introduction forever; it’s that captivating. There’s also a good reason to spend a lot of time on it right now – first, to work out how best to change between chords and second, to get comfortable with the finger picking pattern. It goes without saying that there are a lot of different ways to approach both of these and you may find solutions that work better for you than whatever I might suggest. So, bearing that in mind, here are some suggestions. First, concerning the actual picking, you might want to try the typical classical approach, using your thumb (labeled “T”) for the three low strings, your index finger (“i”) for the G string, your middle finger (“m”) for the B string and your ring finger (“a”) for the high E string, like this:

Again, I can’t stress enough that there are all sorts of ways of doing this. The most important thing is for you to be comfortable enough with whatever fingers you’re using so that you can get your picking as close to being on autopilot as possible. Other aspects of this song are going to be tricky enough and you want to have something you can easily use as a fallback point.

Concerning the fretboard fingering, and after more than (quite) a few runs through these chords, I decided to finger the Em11 with my index finger on the second fret of the G string and my middle finger on the second fret of the D string. Doing so (and I’m more than happy to admit this) feels more than a little awkward at first, but it also allows you to keep that finger in place throughout each chord change in the introduction. Speaking of which, here it is:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

In all the Internet transcriptions or chord charts I saw on Sailing to Philadelphia, only three different chords are used in the introduction. But I kept hearing a fourth chord being used for the seventh measure, immediately before the E (or D if you’re using a capo) in the eighth. Using a Dadd9 seems to fit the bill. Also, you can finger it like a regular open position D chord in this tuning, which seems comforting somehow. Once there, adding the pinky to the fourth fret will get you the straight D chord.

I also want to note here that these two measures are the only place in the whole arrangement of the song that I’m still a little unhappy with. Repeated listening to the original recording convinces me that someone is playing what would be a low D note (actually E taking the capo into account) but there’s just no way of doing it without using “double Drop D” tuning, but then I have to have longer fingers than I do to make the other chords. But that’s okay.

Picking this section took a little getting used to as well. Essentially I switched to using only three fingers (thumb, index and middle) and then switched up a string halfway through the measure, like this:

Again, you may very well come up with other solutions for this section. Have fun and try out different ideas.

The Verse (or verses) and The Timing Quirks

The important thing, up to this point, is to have a basic picking pattern that you can fall back on. You don’t have to, and really, you shouldn’t feel compelled to play it exactly the same throughout the song. If you catch the high E string instead of the B string, for example, who’s going to know you didn’t mean to do that? All picking patterns should serve as a starting point and nothing more. In upcoming MP3 examples, you will hear me miss strings and catch others than what is written out in the tablature. That’s what makes playing organic.

And it becomes essential in Sailing to Philadelphia because the verses of the song go through multiple changes in time signature. I’ve written out the first half of the first verse with just the lyrics, chords and time signature changes for you:

You see that the verse starts with three full measures of Em11 and then switches to a measure of Gadd9 in 2 / 4 time signature. If you want to, think of it as a “half measure” of Gadd9. You certainly can pick it as such:

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After this measure of 2 / 4 in Measure 4, you go into four pairs of measures that alternate between 4 / 4 and 3 / 4 time signatures. Measure 5 (C and Cmaj7 for two beats each) and Measure 6 (D6 for two beats and G for a single beat) are repeated twice:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The trickiest part of this is fingering the D6 chord at the start of Measure 6, but preparing for it in Measure 5 can make things easier. In Measure 5, you start with a C chord and then remove your index finger to make Cmaj7. You then slide your ring and middle fingers up two frets and place your index finger at the second fret of the G string to get the D6.

Some people will have trouble with this stretch, and there are other ways of trying to make this chord. First, and this requires a little bit of “re-thinking things,” you can make the initial C chord without the middle finger, using your pinky for the third fret of the A string and your ring finger for the second fret of the D string. This does take more thought than you might think because you’re just not used to making a C chord in this fashion. If you can get past that, then you should find sliding the pinky and ring finger up two frets and dropping the index finger onto the second fret of the G string won’t be as big a stretch to deal with.

Another option is to simply leave the G string open. This creates a D13 chord and will sound perfectly fine. And you can also use either the Dadd9 or the D that you learned in the Introduction as a viable substitute.

As mentioned earlier, and as I mention in the MP3 sound file, the main concern here is getting the changes in timing right, not on nailing every note in the picking pattern. Don’t hesitate to count out loud to help you get comfortable with the shifts in time signature.

The final change in time signature, another 4 / 4 to 3 / 4 shift in Measures 11 and 12 is much easier in terms of the chord change and is followed by the same Dadd9 to D that you learned in the last two measures of the Introduction:

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Pardon the pun, but do take your time with this section. As discussed earlier, once you have the picking pattern in your fingers, it’s just a matter of changing it up according to both the chord changes and the time signatures involved. Here is a full run through the verse chords and timing:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Remember, too, that this is technically half a verse. You want to run through the whole thing twice – once for Dixon and once for Mason, or vice versa.

The Chorus

All your work on getting comfortable with the finger picking pays off in the chorus as the pattern holds constant throughout. In the first four measures, you have a chord change every two beats, but the majority of the changes involve fingerings that you should have no trouble with:

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Using a different voicing of Bm7 (x20204) in the fifth measure bring out the melody line and brings some variety to your chord choices, but you can certainly stick with the first voicing (x20200) from the fourth measure if you find it easier to play.

The final C to D change, technically Cmaj7 to D13, uses the same slide of the fingers along the A and D strings from the 4 /4 to 3 / 4 measures of the verse. The second time the chorus is played, this ending is extended:

If you keep your ring finger set on the A string while playing this, you should find using your middle finger for the D string on the Cmaj7 and D13 chords and then changing to your index finger for the fifth fret of the D string on the Em7 chord relatively easy to do.

All right, then! Let’s put it all together, shall we?

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This lesson on Sailing to Philadelphia is a little more involved than many of our Guitar Noise song lessons, but I hope that you make the time to try it out. It is a beautiful song and, once you have the picking and time signature changes down, will be a bit of music you will never grow tired of. And there are all sorts of experimenting and exploring you can do on your own to make it even more enjoyable!

And, as always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

My basic approach to creating this arrangement was to develop the following sequence of layers: Melody, Bass Line, Harmonization, and then fine tune it to my liking.

I began by searching the internet for sheet music with tabs.  I also found it useful to search Google “Images” to find sheet music.  I transposed the melody to a new key so that I would be able to play in the open position on the first and second strings mostly, while making sure that the chords would be open chords, and easy to fret.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I then added the bass notes on the first and third beat of each measure.  I chose these beats because they are the common accented beats in 4/4 time.  Since the arrangement still sounded a little dull, I added a harmonizing note for most of the notes played.  I simply chose the note on the string above the melody note.  I also noticed that there were several pauses that could use some kind of fill, so I played arpeggios, using notes on the strings that were not being played.  As I played the piece for a few days, I found that I usually never played the bass note on the third beat and, to my ears, this sounds just fine, if not better.  However, I left the extra bass notes in the notation just in case you want to play them.

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I believe that my first attempt created an easily playable, and enjoyable sounding finger style lullaby arrangement.  I hope you have enjoyed it, and that you will play it.  Remember that it is a lullaby, and should be played softly at a moderate tempo.

There are two articles here on Guitar Noise, that really that helped me get to this point: “Arranging Things – An Introduction to Song Arrangement – Part 1” by David Hodge, and  “Birth Of A Chord Melody” by Graham Merry. If you’ve not read them, you should take a minute and do so. They might inspire you to come up with a chord melody arrangement of your own!

Some Final Thoughts on Using PowerTab

I used PowerTab – a free software package – to arrange, review, and create the sheet music/TAB for this piece.  One feature that I had not learned how to use prior to this piece is the “high” and “low” melody feature.  This gives you the ability to have quarter notes in the melody, and half notes for the baseline, as in the examples that accompany this article.  This option is found under the menu option “Music Notes/Low Melody” (high melody is the default, the keyboard shortcut for toggling between the two is ‘ u ‘).  You can search the help files or Google for more details.

My second suggestion is to be sure to play your file as you work on it.  Play it often, and trust your ears.  You will be able to hear a missed note, or something not timed right.  It is better to catch it early, than to build on a mistake and have to correct more when you find the mistake.

It’s likely that many of you know this song, but in case you don’t, go to YouTube and search for “What a Wonderful World Louis Armstrong” and you’ll be in for a real treat.

So if you’re ready, then let’s get to it…

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

Like my first arrangement, the process started by searching the Internet for the chords and lyrics. “What A Wonderful World” was performed by Louis Armstrong in the key of F, and that’s what I found on the Internet websites. I prefer the sound of chords with open strings, and in F, a few of the chords were not my favorites such as Bb and Db. They’re doable, but I really wanted a friendlier key. After a while of some experimentation and transposing, I settled into the key of C. I decided that, as far as this lesson goes, I’d put my Capo on the fifth fret and my arrangement in C would actually be in Louis Armstrong’s F for those wanting to play along with his recording.

So, here is the Internet arrangement of “What a Wonderful World” transposed to the key of C:

In case you’re not familiar with the tune, here’s the entire melody, written after closely listening to Louis Armstrong’s performance; and, giving credit where credit is due, playing that melody several times for my wife, Nancy, who has a great ear and the ability to say things to me like, “Hank, that note right there didn’t sound right”, or “I think you added an extra beat in there someplace”.

And, here’s how this melody sounds:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

“What A Wonderful World” consists of a verse played a total of three times and a chorus. The first verse ends with a “turnaround” that gets it back to the beginning for the second verse. Following the second verse, the chorus is played once. The third and final verse has four additional measures when compared to the first two verses. Those four measures serve as the final ending.

[NOTE: What I've called the chorus throughout this lesson is actually a bridge. David pointed this out to me after I had submitted my entire lesson, MP3's and all, to him for his review. Thankfully he was kind enough to not insist that I make the necessary corrections in this lesson, which would have involved a lot of work. So please forgive the misnomer and please keep in mind every time you read or hear the word "chorus", it's really the bridge that's being referred to. One final word on this... my error made it obvious that I needed a little work at recognizing song structure, so I read and bookmarked David's lesson, "Unearthing The Structure". I think I've got it now.]

Initially I began playing the chords in root position as taken from the Internet, and I sung along. It wasn’t bad, but I thought I could do better, particularly by adding some movement in the bass. I also decided that I wanted to catch as many melody notes as possible on the upper strings of the various chords to help carry my voice and the voices of those in my church who would be singing along with me. So, here’s what I came up with, starting with the first verse and “turnaround” ending:

As you can see, the first line has a descending bass movement from C to B to A to G. Similarly the second line bass notes move from D to C to B to A. There’s even a bit of ascending bass movement in the turnaround in the last line from C to E to F to G. As mentioned earlier, I’ve also incorporated most of the melody notes into the upper strings by carefully selecting the various chord voicings. If I’m really conscientious about ending the chords on a melody note, then I have to be careful not to play the first string on the C chord in the first line, on the E7/B and Am chords in the second line, and on the Dm7/G and G6 chords in the third line. The reason for this is that in these chords the melody notes fall on the second string. If I really want to get picky about hitting the melody notes, then I also have to avoid the first two strings in the Ab chord in the third line since the melody note is the C on the third string. Frankly, this all may be more trouble than it’s worth, particularly if you are strumming. The chord voicings do sound fine as written, and the vocalist will hopefully be hitting the melody notes properly.

Of the chords in this first verse, I have a few favorites. One is the F6/A in the first line. I wanted to hit the A melody note on the fifth fret of the first string, so I knew that I could take a “C form” partial barre chord and slide my first finger up to the fifth fret to play an F chord called for in the Internet arrangement. However I wanted an A as the bass note, so it made sense to play an open fifth string to get the A in the bass. I realized that leaving the fourth string open would make the fingering of the chord much easier. I also realized that the D of that open fourth string is the sixth of an F chord. I strummed, it sounded beautiful to me, so the F6/A became my choice.

My other favorites are the four chords that make up the turnaround in the last line. First, there is an ascending bass line. Second, the open high E string that all four chords have in common is the melody note that is held for two measures and, in my mind, gives the very cool effect of a “pedal” tone.

Let’s listen to the first verse. Because this song was arranged with a lot of attention to movement in the bass notes, this first sound file will be played by striking the bass note on the first beat followed by a down stroke on the second beat. I will try to end those down strokes on the melody note, but again if I miss one here or there it won’t make that much difference. As long as the notes strummed are part of the chord, they’ll sound fine. In case you’re interested, I’m using a pick for this.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Let’s have another listen to the first verse, this time played finger style. With my right finger picking hand, I generally use my thumb for the bottom three strings and use my index finger on the third, my middle finger on the second, and ring finger on the first string. Again I’ll be attempting to hit the bass note on the first beat, though at times I will likely “pinch the bass note with my thumb and catch a higher chord note with one of my fingers. After playing the bass note, I generally will play the rest of the chord with arpeggios, trying to catch the melody note as the top voice. But don’t be surprised if I through in a simple strum now and then for variety.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Let’s now have a look at the second verse:

As you can see, the only difference between the first and second verses is the ending. In playing the C and the F chords for the ending’s first measure and the C chord for the ending’s second measure, it is a good idea to try to stay clear of the high E string since the melody note for both measures is the C located at the first fret of the second string.

Let’s listen to this second verse. I’ll play it through once – again I’ll be hitting the bass note on the first beat. On the second half of that beat I’ll be hitting the next chord note and on the second full beat I’ll pluck the remaining chord tones. I’ll be using just my right thumb for first beat and just my fingers for the second.

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That wasn’t so bad, was it? The second verse leads right into the chorus; so let’s see how this looks:

A few words about the chorus: The G chord in the first two lines is voiced so that the D melody note is included on the second string. If you are intent on emphasizing that melody note, simply avoid playing the first string. The Csus4 chord resolving to the C chord in the first two lines emphasizes the portion of the melody that moves from the F to the E on the first string. The reason for voicing the Am7 chords in the third and fourth lines as barre chords is to catch the A melody note on the first string. The G chords that follow could just as easily be played in an open position, if that’s your preference – I just find it easier to slide my index finger down two frets and reform the G chord as a barre. I really wanted to accentuate the D melody note on the final G chord so I intentionally placed an “x” on the first string as a reminder not to play that string.

The optional “Blackbird” licks notated in the first measure of the first two lines are applicable if you are playing this arrangement finger style as I usually do. That first measure can certainly be played utilizing the G chord for all four beats, or alternatively, to make things a bit more interesting, the G chord can be played for two beats and the “Blackbird” lick can fill in the last two beats if played as a triplet. Most of you probably recognize this as part of the Beatles’ Blackbird (Guitar Noise Songs for Intermediates # 2), although you can certainly hear it in many other songs as well. On the sound files you’ll likely hear me playing this first measure as follows:

Let’s keep things simple for a moment and listen to the chorus strummed without the “Blackbird” lick:

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For the next sound file for the chorus, I chose to go finger style, and I chose to go with the “Blackbird” lick, because I like it so much, and it just seems to add interest to the accompaniment. At the very end of the chorus, one thing you’ll hear me do on the Dm7/A chord is to actually play the melody to “I love you”. It’s pretty simple – all I do after hitting the F on the first fret of the first string is lift my index finger and strike the open E melody note. That followed up by the Em/G chord with the second string D as the melody note and you’ve got it. So, without further ado, let’s have a listen to this version:

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At last we arrive at the third and final verse. As you’ll see, the first two lines are identical to those in the first two verses. The third line starts out the same as the previous verses but has a different ending in the last two measures. And there is a fourth line that serves as the ending for the song. Here’s what it looks like:

In my opinion, it’s a good idea to play the melody note of the very last three chords (the ending) properly. All that entails is to avoid the first string in the first C chord, so that the melody, the “world” is played on the C on the second string for two beats. The “Oh” is sung over an F7 chord, and again the first string should be avoided to accentuate the melody note C on the second string for another two beats. The final C chord that accompanies the “yeah!” can be played normally and held for four beats since that very last melody note is on the open E of the first string.

Just to mix things up a bit, I’m playing this verse using my thumb to strum the chords. Here’s how the entire third verse sounds:

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As tempting as it might be to call it quits here, to make this song really sound professional, it really needs an “intro”. I wanted some type of instrumental “intro” that would make a nice transition into the vocals. I decided that the ending of the first verse – the part that goes, “… and I say to myself, what a wonderful world.” – would work well. I wanted this “intro” to be a chord melody style and here’s what I came up with:

Let’s give this “intro” a listen:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Well, we’ve been through all the sections of “What A Wonderful World” and now the real work begins! Practice, practice, practice until the chord changes come naturally and our fingers fall into place without having to think too much about it all. I certainly do need more practice. Anyway, here’s the complete arrangement from the very start of the song down to the sweet “Oh yeah!” finish:

And, as an added bonus, here’s my humble attempt at playing “What A Wonderful World” in its entirety. This time through I’ll be playing the “intro” and verses finger style. I’ll also be playing the chorus with my fingers, but I’ll primarily be strumming and will be leaving out the “Blackbird” licks this time through. That’s the nice thing about this and most other songs… there’s really no set rule that says that you have to play it one particular way or play it just like someone else. Best thing is to do what sounds good to you and what is within your capabilities.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

In closing, I just want to repeat what I said at the end of my previous lesson, that arranging this tune was has taken a lot of time and effort, but again it was well worth it. I’ve learned a great deal by doing this, and the end result is very personally satisfying and rewarding. I’m confident that I’ve got lots more arrangements in me just waiting to come out.

Making a lesson is as much work as, if not more than, the actual arrangement itself, and again really makes me appreciate how fortunate we all are to have Guitar Noise and all the writers here who take the time to help make all of us better players. Thank you again for that, Paul, David, and everyone! I’m happy to be able to contribute to this wonderful organization.

And, as always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page – I do follow that forum and will be happy to read your comments or answer your questions. You can also email David directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com. David has been good at forwarding comments that you may want to make to me.

Until next time,

Hank Stupi

Fast forward to the 80’s… I got into playing harmonica, pretty much by ear, copying licks from every blues album I purchased. I practiced a lot and got real good. So happens I landed a job as an accounting professor at a community college (great job – stayed at it until retiring in 2006) and among the many perks were free classes. So I took an “Introduction to Music Theory” class to help me figure out what the heck I was doing on my harmonica. That class changed my path drastically. Within a few years, I’d taken three theory classes, two ear-training/sight reading classes, two piano classes, and a jazz-improvisation class. I then became dedicated to becoming a pianist and spent the next five years rigorously practicing, but then came face to face with the hard reality that I had no talent for the piano.

A bit dejected at my failure as a pianist in 2001, I decided to revisit the guitar, but this time trying to integrate the musical knowledge I’d picked up along the way. So for about seven years I went through dozens of video lessons and almost as many instructional books. I practiced a lot, but somehow it never all came together. Then early in 2009 I discovered Guitar Noise, a major milestone on my journey. David’s style of teaching and playing fit me like a glove. I started at the beginning and went through every podcast – all of a sudden I really understood and could play rhythm. I could even add simple bass lines and frills here and there to make things more interesting.

As the months went by, I went through all of the easy songs for beginners and most of the songs for intermediates. All those years of practice soon seemed to pay off as everything started to fall in place and my confidence increased. In mid-July 2009 the pianist who does the accompaniment at my church told me that she’d be out of town the following week and asked if I could put on some CD’s for the hymns. Somewhere the courage came for within to suggest that I provide the accompaniment on my guitar. I wasn’t wild about most of the songs in the hymnal, so I chose “Imagine” by John Lennon, knowing that Guitar Noise has a nice arrangement of that, and the old spiritual “Down By The Riverside” from the hymnal. I even decided to play during our quiet time of reflection, a soft arpeggio arrangement of “If” by Bread which I learned years ago. I practiced hard and everything went well. In all honesty, what mostly gave me the courage to do this is what David has said time and time again, something like… “Don’t get hung up on making mistakes. You will make mistakes – the only way not to make them is not to play, and that’s not an option. The important thing is to maintain the tempo.” Anyway, I’ll be filling in for her for three months this winter when she heads south.

So, why did I choose “Smile” as my very first arrangement? Well, in preparation for my church “gig” this winter, I’ve been keeping my ears open for songs that I know and believe most folks in my church will know. I like songs that have a nice message. “Smile” fit the bill. Coincidentally it happens to have been Michael Jackson’s favorite song… it’s always been one of my favorites too. Why a chord melody arrangement? I like the challenge and I like the beauty of a nice chord melody arrangement. I’ve always considered these arrangements as beyond my capabilities, however the lessons here at Guitar Noise have instilled in me a “can-do” attitude that I previously lacked. I’ve learned that if I keep the arrangement within my own playing abilities and don’t worry about sounding exactly like someone else’s recording, with some experimentation, effort, and patience it can be done.

“Smile” was the theme music for Charlie Chaplin’s last silent picture, “Modern Times,” in 1936 composed by Chaplin himself. It became officially “Smile” when John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons added the lyrics. If you go to YouTube and search for “Smile Nat King Cole” you’ll hear his wonderful vocal and orchestral performance.

So if you’re ready, then let’s get to it…

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

The process started by searching the Internet for the chords and lyrics. Here’s what I initially found:

I know the melody to “Smile” and quickly realized that in the key of A, I would have to play it on the second, third and fourth strings. That seemed way too low, so I strummed a basic C chord and found the melody easily playable on the first, second, and third strings. That sounded much better to me. So my first step was to move all of the chords up three semitones as follows

In case you’re not familiar with the tune, here’s the bare bones melody, written from memory:

Here’s how this rather simple melody sounds:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

“Smile” is pretty much a “verse only” song structure that is basically sixteen measures long. And thinking of that verse as being divided into two equal parts makes a lot sense. In my arrangement, the verse is played twice. The first time through it ends with a “turnaround” that gets it back to the beginning of the song. The second time through it ends with a small “coda” or outro that serves as the ending. When Nat King Cole recorded this, the verse was played a third time, all instrumental for the first eight measure part, followed by vocals for the second eight measure part, and ending the tune with the outro.

Now since I wanted this to be a chord melody arrangement, I began playing the above chords and seeing how I could best fit all of the melody notes in. As an example of my first attempt, let’s look at the first four measures:

Initially, that sounded pretty good to me, although a bit busy since it consisted of all eighth notes played in arpeggios. I proceeded onward in this style and after many hours sent a copy of my initial arrangement to David here at Guitar Noise. His response was encouraging, saying it was a very cool arrangement and also pointed out that there were definitely more things that could be added, particular with running the bass notes a little more.

Looking at my “first draft,” I realized that he was certainly right about running the bass lines. I pretty much had stuck with the root note of each chord. So I decided to work on the arrangement some more seeing if I could create some movement in the bass. As I worked on this, I could see plenty of room for bass line movement, however, adding additional bass notes made the arrangement even busier and much harder to play. I found that if I truly wanted to add some bass lines, I had to simplify and pare down a lot of the “busy-ness” in the upper strings. As I did this, the arrangement actually became sparser, but began to sound more interesting. Losing many of the eighth notes seemed to make it “breathe,” which made the arrangement sound more of a natural character and less as a first time exercise. To show you what I mean, let’s look at the final version of the first four measures:

As you can see the eighth note arpeggios are greatly simplified and there is definite descending bass line movement. The descending bass pattern of the first two measures repeats itself in measures 3 and 4. Actually, the entire accompaniment (the part on the lower four strings) follows the same two-measure picking pattern, making it easier to play. Looking at the chord boxes, a big difference is the addition of many more chords. Those additional chords were necessary not only to take into consideration the additional bass notes, but also to help me in placing my fingers on the fret board to play the necessary melody notes and other chord notes which enrich the arrangement.

OK, I’m ready to discuss some of the theory and technical aspects of playing this tune. But before I do, I want to mention a valuable lesson that I learned as I practiced this tune. In the final stages of putting this lesson together, I had a conversation with my sister-in-law about what I had been doing for Guitar Noise. She made a comment to me about putting “feeling” into music. Her comment came serendipitously at just the right moment. The more I had practiced in the previous few days, the less I liked how my arrangement was sounding. As I was practicing “Smile” later the evening of our conversation, I realized that what had been missing was this musical “feeling”. I had previously been concentrating solely on the “mechanics” of the tune. I found that by slowing down and attempting to put into this tune the part of music that tends to stir my spirit, everything sounded so much sweeter. I hope I can convey some of that in the MP3 files that we’ll encounter later on.

First of all, with my right finger picking hand, I generally use my thumb for the bottom three strings and use my index finger on the third, my middle finger on the second, and ring finger on the first string.

I start off the first measure by forming a C chord. On the third beat, I simply lift my middle finger from the second fret of the fourth string and place it on the B at the second fret of the fifth string to form the C/B chord. I then catch the D melody note on the third fret of the second string with my pinky. Since I’ve kept my index finger on the first fret of the second string, I simply go into the second measure by keeping my index and pinky fingers in place, while placing my middle and ring fingers in their normal positions for the Am chord. After lifting my pinky to play the C in the melody, I form a Gadd9 chord with my ring finger on the G at the third fret of the sixth string and my middle finger at the A melody note on the third string, which is the ninth of the Gadd9 – in practicing this I often find myself finger picking the open G string just prior to covering the second fret of that string, rather than picking the open D string as written, but since they’re both chord tones it sounds fine either way. Either way, since I’m not playing the first string, I just leave that open. In measure three the Cmaj7 chord gives me what I need for the first two beats. For the last two beats I shift my middle finger to the B bass note on the second fret of the fifth string. Since I’m not playing the fourth string I don’t worry about covering the second fret. I play the last two melody notes with my index and pinky fingers. In measure four the Am chords works well. I need to lift my index finger to strike the open B melody note. The Gadd9 appears again at the end of the fourth measure and again I don’t concern myself with the unplayed high E string. By lifting my middle finger I’m ready for the final G melody note of the open third string.

Let’s give these first four measures a listen:

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Here are measures five through eight:

Again there is a nice descending bass line in the first two measures above, as well as in the last two measures. If you look at Babylon – David Gray (Guitar Noise Songs for Intermediates # 1), you’ll notice a lot of similarity between the last measure above and David’s second measure of the second line in the chorus of Babylon. I borrowed part of that neat lick from him.

Let’s talk about the fret board fingering. The Am in the first measure above is fingered normally and should present no problem. To play the G6, I simply lift all my fingers and catch the G at the third fret of the sixth string with my ring finger. I don’t worry about the B on the fifth string since I don’t play that note. The C melody note on the first fret of the second string is easily fretted with my index finger. Keeping that index finger in place I move on to the Fmaj7 using my thumb to catch the low F. After all that work, I take a brief rest and completely remove my left hand and simultaneously play the open second and sixth strings catching the C melody note on the second string easily with my index finger. After that brief rest, I form a Dm chord moving into the third measure above. After that I give myself a break again and play the Cmaj7 chord by simply lifting my fingers and placing my ring finger on the third fret of the fifth string and again catch the last melody note of that measure with my index finger. Well rested, I’m ready to quickly form an A chord, ending the last measure above with the “Babylon lick,” using my index and middle fingers first, finishing that lick with my middle and ring fingers.

Let’s see how these four measures sound

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The second half of “Smile” is arguably prettier than the first half. Let’s look at measures nine through twelve.

In these four measures there’s a temporary break from the walking bass lines in the first half of the tune. Also for the sake of some variety the first and third measures above have some pretty arpeggios incorporating both the melody and bass notes.

Let’s discuss the fingering. A Dm7 barred chord makes the first measure above a snap. The only additional requirement is to catch the G melody note at the eighth fret of the second string with the pinky. In the second measure above, hold everything momentarily in place as the G melody note is struck and then quickly bring your fretting hand back to the lower register of the fret board. Striking the open D string buys a bit more time to get your index finger on the F for the eighth note at the first fret of the first string. I play the D note at the third fret of the second string with my ring finger. For the third measure above, jump right into an Fm chord played with a partial index finger barre of the first three strings at the first fret while covering the F root note at the third fret of the fourth string with your ring finger. I hold that chord form and use my pinky at the third and then fourth frets of the first string for the last two melody notes of that measure. That same shape also serves me well for the first three notes of the fourth measure above, again using my pinky to go from the G to the F melody notes on the first string. To finish up that last measure I hit the open high E string while moving my middle and ring fingers into position for the last two notes at the third fret.

Here’s how it sounds

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We’re at the home stretch with the last four measures and endings

As you can see, we’ve got a nice descending bass line again. For the Cmaj7 chord in the first measure above I try to really let the upper three open strings ring out as this tune draws to a close, carefully placing my index finger on the F melody note at the first fret of the first string while placing my middle finger on the B bass note at the second fret of the fifth string to form what we need of the Cmaj7/B chord. After lifting my index finger to get the open high E string, I play a simple version of an F chord. I do want to strike the open A string for the bass note, so technically this is an F/A chord since the A note is in the bass. As much as I’d like to let the three upper strings ring, I find myself removing all of my fingers in anticipation of the upcoming G6 chord played with my ring finger on the bass note and pinky on the melody note – I don’t worry about fingering the B on the fifth string and therefore avoid striking that open fifth string. Another point, since I am not playing the open E first string, the sixth of a G6 chord, this really ends up being a G chord with a D as the upper melody note. As I lift my pinky, I’ve got my index finger on the C melody note at the first fret of the second string.

The Dm/F in the third measure above takes some practice. For me the best way to form it is by placing my thumb on the F bass note and forming a Dm chord normally with my fingers – actually in practicing it, I’ve found it helpful to forget about struggling to get my index finger onto the first string, since I’m not hitting that high F note anyway. Once I’ve got that it’s not too difficult – all I need to do is lift my middle finger from the second fret of the third string to play the open G melody note.

For the first ending, I just place my ring finger on the G bass note, again not worrying about the unplayed fifth string and simultaneously strike the open high E melody note, the sixth of a G6 chord. My guess is that most of you recognize what comes next as part of the Beatles’ Blackbird (Guitar Noise Songs for Intermediates # 2), although you can certainly hear it in many other songs as well. This “Blackbird lick” leads us nicely into a repeat of the entire tune.

In the second ending (or third ending depending on whether you’ve played this through three times as Nat King Cole did) that same G6 chord is fingered and for the necessity of playing the open high E melody note twice, played as an arpeggio. The tune is ended with a C chord. I try not to strike the high open E string since the melody is at the C at the first fret of the second string. I sometimes play this last C chord for two measures. I’ll either play the first measure with arpeggios and the second by strumming the C chord. I’ve also strummed the C chord for a measure and then let a pair of harmonics ring out on the first and third strings since they are C chord tones. The choice is yours.

Let’s have a listen to these last measures. By the way these last measures with the first “Blackbird” ending can be used as an excellent introduction at the beginning of the tune.

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Here’s the entire tune:

In preparing this lesson’s final MP3, the complete arrangement of “Smile”, I learned two valuable lessons that I’d like to share. I had never recorded my playing before and I learned how helpful it is to truly listen and hear where more work or practice needs to be done. The other valuable lesson that I learned as I listened to my MP3 attempts was the importance of emphasizing and keeping the melody flowing in a chord melody arrangement. As I made the many chord changes in the tune, I was able to hear short and slightly unpleasant hesitations in the melody. I really had to work on that, so much so that in the F and Dm/F chords near the end of the tune, I found it helpful to strike the melody notes on the beat and delay the bass notes for a half beat in order to keep the melody flowing. I haven’t mastered “Smile” yet, but I hope you’ll find it pleasing nonetheless. So without further ado, here’s my rendition of this song:

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In closing, I just want to say that arranging this tune has taken a lot of time and effort, however, the journey and end result has been very personally satisfying and rewarding. I’m ready for a break for a while, but I’m sure that I’ve got more arrangements inside of me… I’ve been thinking about “What A Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong, another one of my favorites.

Making a lesson out of this arrangement has been a lot of work also, and really makes me appreciate how blessed we all are to have Guitar Noise and all the writers here who take the time to help make all of us better players. Thank you for that, Paul, David, and everyone! And thank you as well for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this wonderful organization.

And, as always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email David directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com. I’m sure that David will forward any comments that you may want to make directly to me.

Until next time,

Hank Stupi

Sometimes we just hear things and play them. Someone plays a chord or strums a rhythm and we just follow along. And someone who has just picked up the guitar will ask how you did that and you don’t really have an answer for them other than “I just do it.”

It should be easy to understand that, for a beginner (not to mention for a teacher), “I just do it” is more than mildly frustrating. How does one go about learning if one can’t get instruction?

The purpose of this lesson, a look at Seven Nation Army, from the White Stripes 2003 major label debut album, Elephant, is twofold – first we want to look at the interesting rhythmic pattern that serves as the song’s signature hook. We’re also going to take the song apart as we normally do in these lessons, but for the purpose of latter creating a single acoustic guitar arrangement of this song. That will be in an upcoming lesson. Today, we’re all electric!

So let’s get through this part and move on:

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

Structurally, Seven Nation Army is about as simple as song come. There are three verses, four if you count the guitar solo between the second and third verse as verse. These verses are essentially made up of two parts, one that repeats itself over and over even though it may be played by just the bass guitar at some points and by a dense, multi-layered recording of guitars the next. This part also serves as the introduction, the outro and as a musical interlude between the verses. There is also a second two-measure pattern that “formally” ends each verse and also pops up during the solo and at the end of the interlude between the first and second verse.

It’s this first part that contains the interesting rhythm we want to look at and analyze. Here is the bass guitar part, a line of single notes, which I’ve written out for guitar:

The first two notes, the E notes located at the second fret of the D string, are harmless enough. The first is a dotted quarter note and lasts for a beat and a half in length, while the second is an eighth note and is a half beat in length. And this would probably be a great place to point out that while I’ve written out to play these notes at the second fret of the D string, you can also play them elsewhere on the neck of your guitar, such as the seventh fret of the A string or the twelfth fret of the low E (sixth) string, if you prefer.

I thought it would be good to have them all within easy fingering of one another.

The last three notes, at first glance, are quarter notes, which would be problematic in that we would be looking at a total of five beats in the first measure, a measure that is clearly marked in “4/4″ time so it should have only four beats in it. Looking closer, though, you should see a little bracket over these three quarter notes and a number “3″ imbedded in that bracket. This indicates that these three notes make up a quarter note triplet, which means that these three notes are supposed to be evenly spread out among these last two beats of the measure.

That may sound simple enough (although I’m certain to many of you it doesn’t sound simple in the least), but how do we go about making this happen? Counting out a triplet over two beats isn’t at all easy, even for seasoned players. So we’re going to “cheat” for a moment and make it simpler to count by pretending the song was written in 2/4 time, like this:

To do this, we’re cutting all the note values in half – half notes become quarter notes, quarter notes become eighth notes and eighth notes become sixteenth notes. A triplet over two beats will become a triplet over a single beat.

The purpose for doing this is to make it easier to count and to get the rhythm into your head. Most people count sixteenth notes like this: “One, ee, and, ah, two, ee, and, ah…” and triplets are counted “one and ah two and ah…” So we’re going to combine these two and make this measure of two beats go “One, ee, and, ah, two and ah.”

The most important part of this is to make the triplet a triplet, spreading the three notes evenly across the beat, and not turning it into a set of three sixteenth notes with a sixteenth note rest attached. If you’ve listened to the first third of Guitar Noise Podcast 3, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

You can help yourself here by tapping out the beats with your foot, slow and steady. When you are comfortable, pick a four syllable word and say it evenly across the beat. “Alligator” works nicely if you’re stuck for one! Say that for a few beats and then start saying a three syllable word (“elephant” might be appropriate, given the song in question), again making sure that the three syllables are evenly spaced in the beat.

When you’re good with the counting, you can put it all back together, first in 2/4 and then back in 4/4, as done in this example:

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You’ll notice that when going back to 4/4 timing, I draw out the triplet on the third beat when counting it aloud. It’s not at all easy to count out even beats while playing quarter note triplets, so I think you may find this method a little easier. And, since this rhythm figure is very much the heartbeat of Seven Nation Army, it goes without saying that you want to work it into your head and fingers so that you can play it effortlessly. Don’t skimp on the practice and, whatever way you choose to count out the beats and rhythms, don’t be shy about counting out loud. It can, and does, help quite a bit.

And once you’re good with this snippet of rhythm, the rest of the song is going to be a breeze! The second part, which we’ll conveniently call “Example 2,” is two measures of power chords (G5 and A5) played in straight eighth notes, like this:

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There are, of course, many ways to play this. On the original recording, there are at least two different guitars playing the part, one using two string power chords and one using two-string power chords for the G5 and then switching to the open position A chord (the A chord shown in the “Alternate” example here). In these examples, I’m using three-string power chords instead of two-string power chords simply because I like the fuller sound. After all, I’m using one guitar instead of overdubbing a second one. You should try out different variations of these chords and see which you like best.

The next section of Seven Nation Army is actually a repeat of the first section, only it’s fleshed out with full chords, using the single note bass line as the root notes for the chords. Again, on the original recording there are at least two different guitar parts. One guitar plays Root 5 position three-string power chords, like this (this example isn’t played in the MP3 files, by the way):

In case you don’t know what “Root 5 Power Chords” or simply what “Power Chords” are, you can address that by taking a quick look at two of our lessons here at Guitar Noise. The first, The Power of Three, shows you how the four basic types of chords (major, minor, augmented and diminished) are formed. The second, Building Additions (and Suspensions) goes on to detail the creation of other chords, with power chords being the first example in the lesson.

“Root 5″ power chords are simply power chords whose root note is played on the fifth (A) string. And you can see that all the power chords in this example have their root note on the A string.

There is another guitar playing full major chords on the D, G and B strings. This guitar is also being played with a slide. I decided not to use a slide for the MP3 in order to keep things simple:

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Hopefully, one of the reasons for using the open position A chord in Example 2 becomes clear here. Your fingers are already in this shape and now you can just slide them up and down the neck of your guitar at will. If you’re careful about your strumming and can avoiding hitting the first (high E string), then you can use a single finger to barre across the second fret for the open position A and then be about your merry way for Example 3.

Another thing to point out here is that in the original recording, the slide guitar uses a single quarter note of the final B chord (which I have here as a half note) and follows that up with a quarter note of A (X0222X). Either way works fine.

When you’re comfortable moving around on Example 3, the only thing left to do is to be able to switch between the sections, from Example 1 to Example 2 to Example 3 and then back again from Example 3 to Example 2 to Example 1, as demonstrated in this MP3:

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That’s essential the whole song, once you put it all together. Feeling very much at ease with this particular rhythm is going to be essential if you’re going to sing and play it at the same time, so be sure to practice it as much as you may have to. Then practice it even more!

Here’s a lay out of how the song goes:

As I mentioned, there is a guitar solo between the second and third verses. It’s done on slide, but can be easily done without it as well and still sound okay. Well, you might want to make a few alterations and we’ll discuss that in a moment.

The solo itself is fairly simple, using just single notes taken, for the most part, from the E minor pentatonic scale in the following positions:

I’ve taken the liberty of adding the two notes taken from outside of the Em pentatonic scale (C at the thirteenth fret of the B string and F# at the fourteenth fret of the high E (first) string) in parenthesis so that you can add them to your practice warm up of the scale.

The solo is played over four repetitions of “Example 3″ and ends by going back to “Example 2.” Since you’re up that high on the neck for the solo, you’ll probably find it easier to play the G5 in the same three-string manner that the slide guitar uses, that is laying your finger across the twelfth fret (X X 12 12 12 X) and playing just the D, G and B strings, as indicated. For the A5, just slide it up two frets (X X 14 14 14 X).

Okay, then, here’s the solo. You will note that there are three places in the first half (the first eight measures) where there’s a double stop on the seventh fret of the D and A strings. These notes are A and E, respectively, so you’re basically playing an inversion of A5 in the solo while the rhythm is playing an E chord. It will sound slightly dissonant. That’s what goes on in the original recording, most probably from using the slide.

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Also, this is not exactly “note for note,” but it’s certainly close enough for anyone but the nittiest of nitpickers.

Anyway, I also hope that you had fun with this song. We’ll be coming back to it later this fall and examining how to turn it into a single acoustic guitar arrangement. That should prove fairly interesting, no?

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

I suppose the first thing I’d better do is apologize for the word “easy” in putting this particular lesson in our “Easy Songs for Beginners” page. But that could, pardon the pun, easily be taken for being discouraging and, if you’ve read anything that I’ve ever written, let alone have taken any of my classes, you know the last thing I tend think about is being discouraging.

So, instead let me say that this lesson, a single guitar arrangement of Lay Lady Lay, a song a lot of people single out as one of their favorites of Bob Dylan, is definitely going to pose some challenges. But rest assured these aren’t insurmountable challenges.

Let’s dispense with the formalities and get right down to work, then, okay?

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

Notice my use of the word “work.” Unlike many people, the word carries no bad connotations with me, and that may be why I have no problem expecting learning any song to involve some work. And that’s after close to thirty-five years of playing. There is little in life that is not going to involve some degree of work. So if you have a problem with the word “work,” you’re kind of setting yourself up with a ready excuse as to why you can’t do something. So now who’s being discouraging?

If anything else, I hope that those of you reading and learning from all the lessons and articles here on Guitar Noise understand and appreciate that nothing about learning the guitar involves magic, anymore than it truly involves me. You are the one putting the effort into learning and making things happen. I’m not much more than a glorified tour guide.

Perhaps a better way of putting it is that even though I’ve done a bit of work for you, putting things in order and arranging them as nicely as possible, you’ve got to also put in the work required for you to make the music happen. I’ll do my best to talk you through the stages as we go. Essentially, we’re going to take something that is slightly difficult and then deliberately make it more difficult in order to get better at our barre chord technique.

First off, let’s deal with some necessary preliminary steps. Structurally, Lay Lady Lay is made up of three verses. Each verse has an “A” section (the “lay lady lay” part) that consists of a four chord progression that repeats itself without the lyrics. This “A” section is then repeated as the second line of the verse and is followed by, a “B” section that lasts for two lines before the verse finishes with one last repetition of the “A” section.

If I go to a book of Bob Dylan songs or get the chords off the Internet or even just figure things out myself by ear, this is what I would come up with for the first verse:

You can see how the verse breaks itself into the AABA pattern.

Now, I don’t know about you, but just seeing that C#m listed there is enough to make me think about changing to a key with easier guitar chords. We’re obviously in the key of A major (although there is a very interesting thing going on that we’ll discuss in a moment), and that’s usually going to involve a few barre chords. I’m counting three here, C#m, Bm and F#m, and even though there are ways of getting around these particular chords, I’m still thinking things might go better with a change of key.

Fortunately, I have read Turning Notes into Stone, which explains how to transpose and I’m ready to change all of the chords to their appropriate matches in the key of G:

But this doesn’t help all that much as now I’ve got to deal with both Bm and F. I have gotten rid of one barre chord, since the F#m in the key of A is now an Em in the key of G, so I guess that’s a small victory. Plus, if I throw a capo on the second fret (as I do in all the MP3 examples for this lesson), then I’m back in the original key of A.

Better yet, I know ways of playing the Bm and F chords that don’t involve full barres. Even better, using these particular chord voicings create a natural descending bass line, even though it’s all way up on the D (fourth) string. Let’s start with G, and then use a “four string” version of Bm where the F# note at the fourth fret of the D string is the bass note. Most people will finger this chord with the index finger on the second fret of the high E (first) string, the middle finger on the third fret of the B string, the pinky on the fourth fret of the G string and then the ring finger on the fourth fret of the D. Technically speaking, we can call this chord, “Bm/F#” even though most chord books will list it simply as “Bm.”

From there we’ll go to the typical “beginner’s F” chord, you know, the one where you lay your index finger across the first fret of both the high E (first) and B strings, while your middle finger is at the second fret of the G string and your middle finger gets the third fret of the D string.

Finally, there’s the basic open position Am chord, but in keeping with the walking descending bass line, let’s not play either the low E (sixth) string or even the open A string and let the E note at the second fret of the D string be our bass note.

Putting all this together and using a basic Travis style finger pattern, such as those we’ve used in other lessons, we can put together something like this:

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Think of this particular pattern as a slight variation of the pinch that you used in the lesson on Dust in the Wind. Because we’re working with sixteenth notes, the thumb will be counting off both the “beat” (the “numbers”) as well as the offbeats (the “ands” between the numbers) while the fingers will hit the notes in between. So, following this last example, start with a pinch (both finger and thumb) of both high and low E strings on the first beat and then pick the D string with the thumb on the “and” between beats one and two. This will be followed by a hit of the B string and then the high E (first) string with the fingers (usually index and middle, respectively) and then the thumb will get the G string on the “and” between beats two and three.

This is not an easy pattern to get right out of the box, so don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t go well at first. I’ve included a “variation” that uses the thumb on every beat and offbeat and for some of you this might prove a helpful starting place. But this will sound better once you get the hang of it, so don’t give up! As with all finger picking patterns, the hardest step isn’t usually getting it into your fingers – it’s being able to stop and then switch to another pattern when you want to!

When you switch to the following chords, your bass note will now be on the D string, so your first pinch will be with the thumb on the D and a finger on the high E (first) string, while your second note with the thumb will be on the G string. And this pattern will hold throughout the remaining three chords.

Before we move on, let’s take a minute and look at this progression. We go from G to Bm and then to F and Am. In the key of G, G is obviously the root (the “I” chord) while Bm is the “iii” chord. It’s not the strongest of progressions, in fact it’s very gentle and subtle and maybe that’s why Dylan went with it as it fits the mood of the song very nicely. The next chord, F, may seem out of place, but in the key of F, F is the root (“I”) and wouldn’t you just be surprised to find out that Am is the “iii” chord? Basically what’s going on here is that we’ve got one “I – iii” progression followed by another. And since Am is also the “ii” chord in the key of G, going from Am to G would be “ii – I” in our original key, another very gentle sounding cadence. I only mention all this because I find this sort of thing interesting, not only from a theory point of view, but also from a songwriter’s perspective.

Anyway, you can, if you’d like, use this pattern and these chord voicings for the entire song and consider the lesson over. Simply skip down to the final example and you’ll find all the chords in a nice “cheat sheet” format and you’d good to go. But if you’d like to get some more work and to, hopefully, get better at playing, then come along and let’s tackle some barre chords.

Why? Because while it’s entirely possible to play guitar all your life and not ever use a single barre chord, you are ultimately limiting much of what you can play. And the only way you’re going to get better at them is to use them. Sitting around talking about how you can’t do them will certainly prove yourself right, but you deserve to treat yourself better than that.

And it’s one thing to strum barre chords, especially on an electric guitar. Try finger picking them on an acoustic if you’d like to get better at them in a hurry!

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This example uses essentially the same finger picking pattern as before, but every chord voicing, with the exception of the Am, is a barre chord. Fortunately, these barre chords are relatively similar and also very close together on the fretboard, so this makes things a little easier for you as you switch from chord to chord.

On the G chord, your index finger barres all six strings at the third fret while your middle finger is on the fourth fret of the G, your pinky is on the fifth fret of the D and your ring finger is on the fifth fret of the A string. If you think about it, your fingers are forming the same shape as the open position E chord. And thinking about your fingers being in this specific shape will help you a lot as you shift from chord to chord.

When changing from the G to the Bm, you want to slightly raise your index finger so that you can shift it down to the second fret (try to stay across all six string even though you’ll only be picking five of them) and, as you shift your index finger, also “relocate” your E shape so that it’s now an “Am” shape, that is, try to transfer all your fingers at one go instead of painstakingly placing them one at a time on the fretboard. You don’t need me to tell you that this is going to be, in all likelihood, a big train wreck the first few (or few dozen) times out. But as your fingers get to understanding what you want them to do, they will seemingly get better a little at a time until you should find that you are handling the change fairly well at a slow speed. And, as you already know, more speed will come with more repetition.

Moving from Bm to F involves more of the same, only this time you’re going back to the E shape. And use the Am at the end of the progression as a chance to catch your breath before doing it all again.

I cannot stress enough that this will probably take most of you some time to get down. Hopefully you understand that something like this is worth the effort on your part. One day you will wake up and think that you just play barre chords by magic, but the fact is that all the time that you’re spending now on this progression will play a big part of that seeming magic.

Again, you can feel free to call it quits here. But if you want to step up to the next challenge, then by all means, let’s continue:

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At first glance, this doesn’t seem all that different from our last example, but it is in a very important way. The first chord, G, is in open position and the second and third chords (the Bm and F) are barres. So that means you’re going to be working on making the shift from the open position G to the Bm barre. To make it even more interesting, I’ve put the F# note at the second fret of the low E (sixth) string, the bass note (I told you earlier there was a reason to barre all six strings on this chord!), so that the bass line now mimics our original “open position” bass line from Example 1. It’s simply an octave lower on the Bm, F and Am chords.

If you play your G chord with your index finger on the second fret of the A string, then you’ve got a head start on making the transition to the Bm a little smoother as all you’ll need do is to stretch it out over the six strings at the second fret. Also take advantage of the fact that your finger picking pattern uses a lot of open strings, which will help you to get a bit of a jump in making the chord change.

Even after all the work you did on the “barre chords only” progression of Example 2, this is going to take more energy and effort on your part. I can only tell you that it will, in the long run, be worth every bit of it. I hope you can trust me on that!

One of the (many) reasons for all this dealing with barre chords is that the technique of barring can help you out a lot even when you’re not playing barre chords. Confused? Well, let’s look at our next example to shed a little light on that:

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This latest pattern is a dead ringer for our first pattern but I’ve decided that I’d like my single guitar arrangement of Lay Lady Lay to contain some of the textures of the pedal steel guitar that accompanies Dylan in the original recording. Absurd, you say? Well, I certainly cannot make my acoustic sound like a pedal steel, even on a good day. But by mimicking some of the notes and licks by use of a hammer-on, such as at the end of both the Bm and F chords here in this example, I can give the listener a bit of the flavor of the pedal steel guitar and hope that his or her mind fills in the rest.

The easiest way of getting these particular notes, you might notice, is by raising and lowering my index finger, just as if I were barring the second fret (for the Bm) or first fret (for the F). And if I want to emphasize the very low bass notes, as we did in Example 3, this would be the only way of accomplishing this. So now you’ve got another excellent reason for keeping up with the barre chord work.

Okay, just to keep this lesson from being too one dimensional, let’s tackle the “B” section of the verse:

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In order to give this section a bit of its own identity, I’ve changed the picking pattern to more of a “straight down and up” sort of arpeggio while keeping the rhythm of the finger pattern of “Section A.” Note the use of the E (second fret of the D string) as the first bass note in the Em chord. This mimics the bass player in the original recording. Playing the B at the second fret of the A string for the second of bass note of the Em chord makes a nice lead down to the G (third fret of the low E (sixth) string) that starts the second measure.

This section also contains what most folks think of as the “signature lick” of this song, namely the little ornamentation at the end of the second measure. To play this, start by fingering an Am7 chord (x02010) and pinch only the D and B strings (the ones where your fingers are on). After performing the pinch, pull-off your fingers on both strings. Remember that you always want to tug down a little when you make a pull-off. That’s what gives you a good clear sounding of the notes of the open strings.

On the original recording, there is a slight variation on this lick, which I’ve included in our last example. To play this, first you’ll need to form a different voicing of Am7 (x02013) that uses either your ring finger or pinky on the third fret of the high E (first) string. Once you’ve formed your chord, play a “three finger pinch,” plucking the D string with your thumb, the B string with the index finger and the high E (first) string with your middle finger and then perform the pull-off on the D and B strings as before while leaving whichever finger you have on the third fret of the high E (first) string, firmly in place.

This signature riff, as well as the “multi-finger pinch,” shows up again in the bridge:

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I should note that I deliberately used both the finger patterns from “Section A” and “Section B” for the bridge, but you can feel free to go with either one or the other. Truth be told, I originally wrote it all out in the style of “Section B” but found myself playing the first measure of the bridge in the style of “Section A” and subsequently re-wrote the music! Sometimes your fingers just do what they want to do!

In the second and sixth measures, you’ll find three block chords (D, Em and G) that require a multi-finger pinch. The easiest solution is to use the thumb on the bass note (the open D string or the open low E (sixth) or the G at the third fret of that same string), the ring finger on the high E (first) string, the middle finger on the B string and the index finger on the G string. Another possible method is to use any finger to “sweep’ across all three high strings in an upstroke motion while playing the bass note with the thumb. Both techniques work fine.

In the final measure of the bridge, I throw in another little guitar lick, taken directly from the original recording. This involves playing the open high E (first) string, and then playing the D note at the third fret of the B string before pulling off to sound the open B. After all the work you’ve done so far, this should prove to be a snap.

To put the finishing touches on our arrangement, let’s add an outro:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Here the chords simply ascend up the G major scale, going from G to Am to Bm and then to C. Surprisingly, this is the first use of this chord that normally shows up every two to three chords in the key of G!

This entails a little more complicated picking pattern than before, but you can also use either the pattern from “Section A” or “Section B” of the verse if you’d prefer. Try, though, to pinch the first notes of the chord that I’ve written out as it makes for a very nice melodic line to close the song, moving from the open B string to the C note at the first fret to the D note at the third fret and then to the open E of the first string. Once there, use your pinky to get the G note at the third fret of the first string and then slide the pinky up to the seventh fret for the final note. When you’ve reached it, you’ll also play the G note at the third fret of the low E (sixth) string with your index finger. This is a bit of a stretch and normally I wouldn’t think about trying it, but having the capo at the second fret makes this a lot easier and, again, it mimics the slide guitar part played on the original recording.

And now that we have all our pieces in place, let’s try out the whole thing:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I hope that you’ve hung out and tried the various exercises and techniques involved in this lesson. Part of this, obviously, is meant to both encourage and light a fire under you to get you going on feeling more comfortable with barre chords. Part of it is selfish, as well. We’re going to be doing some lessons in the very near future on Jack Johnson songs that will actually be less involved than what you’ve just accomplished and I don’t want to have to put all of these songs in the “Intermediates” section when you truly would be able to handle them if you simply worked a little on them with some concentrated effort.

Anyway, I also hope that you had fun with it as well. This is a beautiful song that you’ll probably find yourself playing over and over again and wondering what all the fuss about barre chords was about in the first place!

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Since we’ve been doing a lot of finger style guitar work of late here in the Songs for Intermediates pages, and since we’re celebrating Bob Dylan’s birthday by having him as Guitar Noise’s featured artist this month, let’s try our hand at Buckets of Rain, the closing song from the classic Blood on the Tracks album. It may seem like it’s going to be a lot of work, but once you’re comfortable with the basic pattern, it’s not all that hard to play. And it also offers us a chance to develop our ability to play syncopated rhythms, not to mention making us sharpen our sliding technique.

If you’ve not been keeping up with your finger picking, it wouldn’t hurt to check out our two lessons on basic Travis finger style guitar, Let Your Fingers Do the Talking and especially Add a Pinch. You could also give yourself some added (and practical) practice by going through the recent lessons on Dust in the Wind or The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) if you so desire.

So if you’re ready, then let’s get to it…

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

We already have two song lessons here at Guitar Noise from Blood on the Tracks, and I’d like to direct your attention to one of them, Simple Twist of Fate, because Buckets of Rain is also in open tuning. On the album, this song is played in open E tuning (although if memory serves me well, it’s slightly off (perhaps sharp?) on the original recording), but we’re going to use open D and you can find a discussion as to why in the aforementioned lesson. Also, all the MP3 files will be in open D tuning and not in open E.

And just in case you’ve forgotten how to get into open D tuning, we’ll take a minute to refresh your memory. In this tuning the strings are, from low to high, DADF#AD. There are, of course, all sorts of ways to go about changing from standard to open D, but you might find it helpful to use the following steps, provided that your guitar is already tuned in standard (EADGBE) tuning:

1. Tune the low E (sixth) string down to D by matching it against the D (fourth) string. The newly tuned string will be an octave lower.
2. Tune the high E (first) string down to D by matching it against the D (fourth) string. The newly tuned string will be an octave higher.
3. Tune the B (second) string down to A by matching it against the A (fifth) string. The newly tuned string will be an octave higher.
4. Tune the G (third) string down to F# by matching it against the F# note at the fourth fret of the D (fourth) string.

Okay, you’re all set. Here we go!

Stylistically and structurally, Buckets of Rain is kind of a throwback to those old acoustic blues and folk songs. You could make a good argument for it being “old timey” music. A lot of this comes from the arrangement – the guitar is essentially playing along with the melody line, really more like darting all around it so that the guitar lines and the melody lines resemble two birds playfully chasing each other on a spring morning. All the while the bass just harps away at two notes, both D, creating a solid rhythmic drone that the voice and guitar play over.

In essence, this song is simply three four-measure phrases, one for each line of the verse. There are a few musical interludes, but they are essentially just repeats of the three phrases, although there is one distinct variation of the first phrase, which we’ll run across a little later in this lesson.

Pretty much all the fingering you’re going to be doing will be on the first (high D) and third (F#) strings. There will be a brief use of the high A (second) string, but other than that, you’ll be focusing much of your fretting attention on just two strings.

The Bass Line

It’s that bass part that is actually one of the things that will make this lesson both easy and hard at the same time. You want it to (hopefully) stay steady throughout the entire song. Regardless of what else is going on, you’re going to use your thumb as a metronome, alternating on the beats between the low D (sixth) string and the “standard” or regular D of the open fourth string, like so:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

As I said, this may seem way too easy right now, but trust me, there’ll be no end of chances to totally blow the bass once you get going on the “finger” part of the song. If you listen closely enough, you’ll even hear me drop the bass part for a beat or two in the final MP3 for this lesson. So take the time to get this into your fingers and practice keeping the beat steady and even. When you can play this smoothly and hold a conversation while keeping the beat, then you’re ready to move on. And this shouldn’t take all that long.

Remember, too, that this is your fallback point. If you totally lose it, then just drop everything else and get back to putting this bass line together. Think of it as your safety net, if you’d like.

The First Phrase

Once you have the bass down solid, the real fun begins. Here is what we’ll call “Phrase 1.” It needs to be four measures long so you have to repeat it twice. In the notation, I’ve tried to indicate all the bass notes (played with the thumb) via notes with downturned stems and the notes for your fingers with notes having upturned stems:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Becoming more adept in playing syncopated guitar pieces, and being able to create swinging, syncopated rhythms on your own, is probably the main point of this entire lesson, so we might as well get right to it. First, get the fingers of your fretting hand in place. You’ll probably want to use your index finger on the first fret of the F# (third) string and your middle finger on the high D (first) string, although you certainly can use other fingerings if this feels uncomfortable.

On the first beat, you’re going to pinch the low D (sixth) and F# (third) strings with your thumb and index finger, respectively. On the “and” between the first and second beats, you’ll pick the high D (first) string with your middle finger. Some of you will feel more comfortable using your ring finger and that’s fine. Others will want to use only your index finger, no matter how complicated things get. That’s alright, too, as long as it doesn’t keep you from maintaining a steady beat.

Hang on to those notes that you’re fingering and let them ring, even as you hit the regular D (fourth) string with your thumb on the second beat and then slide both fingers two frets up the neck, coming to rest at the third fret of the F# (third) string and the fourth fret of the high D (first) string on the “and” between the second and third beats. Then finish up the measure with another hit of each of the bass notes – low D (sixth string) on the third beat and “middle” D (fourth string) on the last beat. Congratulations! You’ve gotten through the first measure.

Now get your fingers back to where they were at the start of the first measure to begin the second one. You’ll start out exactly the same for the first beat-and-a-half. This time, though, instead of sliding up the neck on the “and” between the first and second beat, you’ll perform a pull off on both strings, letting the open first and fourth strings ring out while you complete the third and fourth beats of the second measure.

And do yourself a favor – don’t think that this is something so easy that you should pick it up immediately. Most people don’t. Depending on just how far you’ve come in your guitar adventures, it’s probably going to take some concentrated effort and repetition to get this right. But, as with most of the material you’ve learned up to this point, it won’t take a great deal of time before you find yourself in a groove and just playing these two measures over and over again.

Incidentally, this is one of those occasions where playing something slowly may not be as helpful as it usually is. It’s very hard to get good slides and pull-offs at exaggeratedly slow tempos. One thing you can do while you’re getting your fretting fingers used to performing these functions is to pinch the notes in question on that “and” between the second and third beat. There’s no shame in doing so. Some people actually prefer the extra punch you get playing those notes with a bit more attack.

Those familiar with our lessons at Guitar Noise know by now that this is just the tip of the iceberg. When you have this initial pattern down as a template, you can come up with all sorts of other variations for it. Here’s one, for example:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

In this variation, I forgo the two-fret slide and try to nail each note along the F# (third) string. This can be done in all sorts of ways – a series of small slides or sliding from the first fret to the second fret and then hammering-on to the third or even hammering on each of the first three frets, which would mean using the pinky to get the note on the fourth fret of the high D (first) string.

There’s also the use of more syncopation – playing the open F# (third) string on the “and” after the fourth beat and then doing a hammer-on to the first fret of that string, landing at the first beat of the next measure.

The point is that you should, once you’re comfortable with the “template,” play around and come up with things on your own. I’ll give you a little tip in this regard – sometimes just trying to work out a few measures like this you end up hitting a “wrong” note or missing a half beat or maybe performing a hammer-on because you didn’t get to a particular note fast enough. You might find you actually like how the “mistake” sounds and presto! It becomes a “variation!” It’s kind of cool how that can work out sometimes.

The Second Phrase

The second measure of what I call “Phrase 2″ is probably the trickiest part of the whole lesson. Take a look and listen before we get started:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Starting out with good fingering here will help you immensely with performing the whole phrase. Most of you should feel most comfortable beginning the first measure with your index finger on the first fret of the F# (third) string and your middle finger on the second fret of the high A (second) string, and you certainly already know that these fingerings are simply suggestions. Feel free to do otherwise. However you decide to finger these frets, you should find the first measure of this phrase mostly harmless, as the saying goes.

Using the suggested fingering frees up your ring finger to perform the pull-offs and hammer-ons involving the high D (first) string that take place in the second measure.

Unlike the first phrase, you should probably go at this second one, at least this second measure of it, at a deliberately slow pace in order to get the timing under your belt. You want the combination hammer-on / pull-off on the third beat to be exactly as written – two sixteenth notes and one eighth note – and not play it as a triplet. It’s not that you can’t play it that way, but rather that you will derail your sense of timing if you do play it as a triplet.

You want to make certain that the last note of this second measure, the F# created by the pull-off on the third string at the last half of the fourth beat, rings out through the start of the following measure. That’s why it appears in parenthesis in Measure 3.

On the MP3 example that accompanies “Phrase 2,” you’ll hear this phrase done twice. The second time I added a small variation by playing a hammer-on to the second fret of the high A (second) string. The timing of that would be just like the hammer-on / pull-off combo we just discussed. This would mean hitting the open high D (first) string right on the second beat at the same time your thumb is hitting the middle D (fourth) string for the bass note.

And it goes without saying that you can come up with any number of variations for this phrase, too.

The Third Phrase

The third phrase, “Phrase 3″ in the notation / tablature examples, sounds like it came straight from any number of blues or old folk tunes. And it’s a great lick to have at your beck and call:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

And while it’s a little on the tricky side, this isn’t anything you can’t handle, especially after what you’ve managed to do so far! The real trick is in making the slides very deliberate.

For starters, take advantage of the fact that the second phrase ended with a complete measure of not needing to have any fretted notes (isn’t it great how some things just work out this way? It’s almost as if it was planned or something!), which gives you more than enough time to move your fingers up the neck and in position.

Probably the simplest way to finger this is to have your index finger set at the seventh fret of the F# (third) string and your middle finger on the seventh fret of the high D (first) string. On the first beat, you’ll again pinch the low D (sixth) and F# strings and then pluck the high D (first) string on the “and” between the first and second beat. Again, keep your fingers on the strings and let them ring.

You’ll begin the second beat in the usual way, hitting the middle D (fourth) string with your thumb and then use a finger (probably the index) to pick the F# string on the “and” between the second and third beat. After you’ve picked that note, slide your index finger down to the fifth fret of the same string. This slide has to be in time with the picking of your thumb so that you land on that fifth fret at the same moment (or as close to it as humanly possible) that your thumb picks the low D (sixth) string at the start of the third beat.

Also, be sure your index finger comes along with you and is sitting at the fifth fret of the high D (first) string. You don’t have to, and probably don’t want to, slide hard enough to make a note. Just kind of have the middle finger come along for the ride. Because then, on the “and” between the third and fourth beat, you want to play that note on the fifth fret of the high D, right where your middle finger should be sitting.

You’ll repeat this process two more times. The next slide occurs right after striking the fifth fret of the F# string again on the “and” after the fourth beat of the first measure. You want to get to the third fret of that string at the first beat of the second measure (and my apologies that the music notation does not seem to want to do this for me and I had to put it in the second measure instead of “between” them!). Here, during this particular slide, some of you might find it easier to switch off of your middle finger and let the ring finger take over fretting duties on the high D (first) string, handling the fourth fret in this instance.

There’s one last slide, from the third fret of the F# (third) string to the first fret of that same string that occurs on the “and” between the second and third beat of the second measure. And since the note being played on the high D (first) string is on the second fret, keeping the ring finger in position seems the easiest way to handle this. On the last half of the fourth beat, you’ll do another double pull-off to sound the open first and third strings and let those two notes run over into the following measure (again, that’s why they’re in parentheses).

Making sure that your slides are more like eighth notes and less like grace notes is important, so it won’t hurt (and never does) to count out loud in order to help yourself be in the right place at the right time.

As far as variations go, you probably aren’t going to want to mess too much with this particular phrase, especially if you’re singing and playing at the same time! But you’ve ample space during the last two measures to add a personal touch or two.

The “Interlude” Phrase

As mentioned earlier, Buckets of Rain is pretty much these twelve measures repeated over and over and over and over again. They are played, just the way we’ve done, first as an introduction and then they serve as the structure of the verses. And they are played as an interlude between the five verses of the song. And they also serve as an outro, played after the fifth verse.

Obviously, one could very easily be bored with this arrangement. Dylan solved this by coming up with an “interlude verse” that begins with a different take on “Phrase 1″ and it goes like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This is played much like the first phrase, only the fingered notes and sliding are much further up the neck and, owing to the use of the C note at the tenth fret of the high D (first) string, give the phrase a strong blues-y feel.

Sliding this high up on the neck, particularly on an acoustic guitar, offers plenty of challenges. Many of you may prefer plucking the note at the twelfth fret of the high D (first) string with your middle or ring finger to give it a bit more of an attack. You’ll definitely hear me do that in the MP3 files – maybe a little overboard, in fact!

Speaking of which, let’s put the whole thing together, shall we? On the original recording the outro consists of a “regular verse” followed by the “interlude verse.” I like to add one last repetition of Phrase 3 for good measure.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I hope you enjoyed this truly fun song and managed to work out a little more concerning syncopation in fingerstyle guitar work. Remember that if you want to be closer to the actual recording, you want to play this with a capo on the second fret, which will move you up from open D to open E tuning.

And, as always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Today we’re going to look at little harder at how we choose a scale to use as a solo. And, hopefully, we’ll see that there can be more than meets the eye.

To make this lesson somewhat practical and useful, why don’t we use a typical rock ‘n’ roll chord progression? How about C to Bb to F to C, say four beats (one measure) each? You can go ahead and give the final MP3 file a listen if you’d like, just to get a handle on what we’ll be working on.

You can hear that C major is definitely what we’d call the tonal center. But is it the key of this progression? We can certainly make an argument for it, and chances are, if you were looking at sheet music for something like this (maybe Bachman Turner Overdrive’s Taking Care of Business, for example) the key signature would indicate C major by having no sharps or flats and adding the Bb to the Bb chord by means of accidentals. You can also find a surprising number of books where a chord progression like this would be written out in the key signature of F, which has one flat (Bb). But C is certainly our center, our sense of “home,” if you will.

Okay, so we have a key. One step down and several decisions to go…

This particular progression, going from the root (I) to the flat seven (bVII) to the four (IV) chord, is very common in rock music. Without batting an eye, you could probably come up more than a dozen songs you know that use it in one form or another. You’ll also find this chord progression in country and folk and even in some guitar studies by the immortal Fernando Sor, which means that people living around 1800 were not strangers to these sounds.

Thinking in terms of the typical rock guitarist, we might automatically reach into our “toolbox” and pull out the C major pentatonic scale. In case you’ve forgotten (even though it’s not been all that long since we used it last!), the notes are C, D, E, G and A.

Looking at the make up of the chords in the chord progression, we find the following:

C major contains the notes C, E and G

Bb major contains the notes Bb, D and F

F major contains the notes F, A and C

While the major pentatonic is not going to cause us a lot of stress, there aren’t a lot of nice target notes from which to choose. By “nice,” in this case, I’m talking about root notes of the chords. There’s C (and E and G, too), but no Bb or F. We do have the D (the third of the Bb chord) and A and C (the third and fifth, respectively, of F). You could use this scale but you will probably find yourself unhappy with how it ultimately sounds. Don’t take my word for it. Since you’ve downloaded the last MP3, give it a try and then come back to the discussion.

Alright, then, the C major pentatonic was a bust, so let’s try the C minor pentatonic. I’m sure you remember this one:

Because we’ve given a very nice rock feeling to this chord progression, using the blues idea of “Minor pentatonic over a major key” works pretty well here. Have a listen:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

We’ve got blue notes Eb (flat third) and Bb (flat seventh) to play over the C chord, and there’s Bb (root) and F (fifth) of the Bb chord and also F (root), C (fifth) and Eb (flat seventh) for the F chord. All and all, this doesn’t do that bad of a job.

Can we do more? Certainly, we can. Take a look at all the notes of our chords again, this time written out as they would appear in a scale:

C D E F G A Bb

Does this look at all familiar? Except for the last note (Bb), everything else is a note of the C major scale. There is, of course, one major scale that has only one flat in it, and that is the F major scale. You’re probably more familiar with it if we start on the root:

F G A Bb C D E

How about that? Of course, you’ve already read A La Modal or any of our other Guitar Noise lessons on modes, so you know that when we use the F scale but start out on the C note, it’s technically the C Mixolydian Mode. And in root six position on our guitar we’ll find it here:

This is an interesting mix because it gives us more target notes, but eliminates many of the “blue notes” because we’re using E instead of the Eb of the C minor pentatonic. Consequently, you get a markedly different feel when using the C Mixolydian, as evidenced here:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Interesting, isn’t it? Even though we’ve got the same progression and I’m using the same style to solo with, this has more of a pop feel and less of the blues edge to it. Many rock guitarists find the Mixolydian mode fits very well into quite a lot of their music.

Of course, you can always decide to “mix and match,” using the C minor pentatonic for a phrase and then switching off to the C Mixolydian for another. But for those of you who enjoy playing one single scale, then I would ask you to think back just two lessons ago in this series and perhaps consider the C Dorian scale, which would be a C scale, only in the key of Bb (which has two flats, Bb and Eb):

Here you’ve got the two blue notes of the C minor pentatonic, plus you’ve got the Eb as a blue note for the F chord, but you still get all three notes of the Bb and F major chords as you did with the C Mixolydian. Here’s what a solo in this scale sounds like:

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You might notice on this solo that I went out of my way to use the D note as a target to make things even more interesting. D on top of the C chord makes Cadd9, and over F creates F6. It is, of course, the third in a Bb chord.

And, as always, I cannot stress enough that these are still only a few of the possible choices available to you, not even counting combining scales, as mentioned just a few paragraphs ago.

And, again as always, this is why it’s vital for you to take the time to experiment and noodle and, most important of all, to listen to what you’re doing so that you can get a feel for what you want and when you want it. Here is a backing track so that you can practice the scales we mentioned, plus any other scales or combinations of scales you might find intriguing:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this and I hope that you are starting to get (or getting more of an idea) that there will almost always be a multiple choice answer to the eternal question of “which scale should I play!”

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time…

Peace

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Targeting in on a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
• Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7

I wrote this little ditty for those of you who are looking to expand beyond “background finger-picking.” The idea is to get you playing your single guitar like a small combo band, complete with a soloist for the melody, a bass for the bass lines (of course!) and someone to fill in the middle with chords and/or harmonies.

To be able to master this, you should already be familiar with your basic chords and comfortable to move fingers around to accommodate changes in their fingerings.

Take a look at the complete arrangement and listen to it on the midi file.

• Download pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

This song incorporates a mini melody, a basic bass line, and little harmony within it. I wrote it to only have one chord function per measure. This makes it easier to understand how it’s put together.

It also helps that this is basically in a twelve-bar blues format (you can find out more about that by reading the Guitar Noise lesson on Before You Accuse Me). So you can see that you’ll be using these chords in these measures:

Measures 1 through 4 – G

Measures 5 and 6 – C

Measures 7 and 8 – G

Measure 9 – D

Measure 10 – C

Measures 11 and 12 – G

A few notes on the Picking Hand:

The thumb handles the bass line. On any measures with “G” – you’ll pluck Strings 6 and 4. Measures 5 and 6 (with “C”) – you’ll pluck Strings 5, 4, 6 and then 4 again. The measure of D will be just the fourth string and Measure 10 (C again) will be just String 5.

Take a listen to the example without the melody and harmony.

• Download pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

View the pdf file of just the Bass part and then compare it to the arrangement.

By using your index and middle fingers, decide which ones will be most comfortable to pluck the notes for the harmony and melody. I would approach a measure at a time. I wrote it in this fashion. As you can tell with the midi file, there is a bit of a shuffle in the rhythmic structure. Add that after you are comfortable with each measure.

E-mail me and let me know if you would like a video of me playing this song.

My e-mail: petersimms.guitar@gmail.com

Have Fun! … Peter

So I’m going to make a concerted effort to put together more of these arrangements, if for no other reason than I enjoy them immensely, too!

To kick off this new set of song lessons, we’ll fall back on our extensive Beatles’ catalogue of material and dust of the George Harrison gem, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, originally released on what folks like to call “The White Album.” So let’s get on with the disclaimer and get to work, shall we?

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

In terms of structure, our lesson song essentially has two parts – a “verse” section that also serves as the backdrop for the introduction and a “bridge” section. One of my (many) reasons for choosing this particular song as a lesson is that both sections involve a descending walking bass line and, in an interesting juxtaposition, the verses are in A minor while the bridge is in A major.

Like many songs, the descending walking bass line of While My Guitar Gently Weeps provides a solid hook, so it’s no surprise that it shows up right at the start of things. On the original recording, there is a short and simple piano riff that we’ll play on the guitar:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Because there’s not much room between the A note of the piano line and the note of the open A string that we’re using to start our descending bass line, I take the liberty of “thickening” the sound a little by using the E note (second fret of the D string) along with the A note of the piano part. You can do this by using two fingers (usually the index and middle fingers) on those notes while hitting the open A string and following bass notes with your thumb. Another option is to “sweep” the two strings in an upstroke with one finger (usually the index). That’s what I’m doing in the MP3 example, in case you’re wondering.

And because you’re going to be working with this bass line and these chords quite a bit, it doesn’t hurt to take the time early on to experiment with fingering. Many people will find it easy to form a regular Am chord and then use the pinky to get the G note (third fret of the low E (sixth) string) in the bass of the Am/G and then have the thumb take on the F# note at the second fret on the Am/F#.

The other tricky spot is the fourth measure, where I’ve written “F6″ for the chord. If any of you have checked out any tablature or chord charts or “cheat sheets” for this song, it’s very likely you’ve seen this “F” or “Fmaj7″ used, the latter probably being the most common. And if you listen to the original recording, you can certainly hear Fmaj7 being played. But because the note of the piano riff we’re using as our melody is D (third fret of the B string) at this point, and because D, when added to an F chord, creates an F6, it just made more sense to write it out this way.

And, fortunately, there are as many ways to finger this particular chord voicing as there are names to call it. You can go with a full barre at the first fret, as shown on the chord chart in Example 1. If you’re good with your thumb, you can first finger an open position Fmaj7 chord using your index finger on the first fret of the B string, your middle finger on the second fret of the G and your ring finger on the third fret of the D. Then use your pinky to get the D note (third fret of the B string) while using your thumb to get the F in the bass at the first fret of the low E (sixth) string. Playing it this way makes getting the melody notes of this measure very easy – you simply remove your pinky and the index finger is already on the C note for you. All you have to do then is drop the pinky back on.

Some people might find it easier to use the index finger for the F in the bass while fretting the D note (third fret B string) with the pinky, the A note (second fret G string) with the middle finger and the F note (third fret D string) with the ring finger. This will mean abandoning the F in the bass in order to use the index finger to get the C note (first fret of the B string) in the melody. That has to be your call.

Something to remember, too, is that as you get more comfortable with the chord changes and with your fingering, you may find yourself changing what you initially decide to do. This happens all the time with guitarists. Something that seemed too hard at first can suddenly become quite easy to do. So don’t stop trying out different ideas and revisiting old ones.

The last four measures of the Introduction are pretty much straight arpeggios based on open position chord fingerings. The only spot where you’ll have to make an effort is in the next-to-last measure, where you’ll need your pinky to finger the F# note at the fourth fret of the D string.

And, speaking of that measure, I also took the liberty of changing the usual D chord you’ll find on most versions of this song to D/F#, simply to have another continuous descending walking bass line. You should know by now that I’m addicted to those things.

Before we move on to the Verse section, let’s chat a moment about what, exactly, we’re trying to do in this lesson. You may have noticed in our working through the Introduction that there’s a lot of space in this arrangement. When working out a “finger style / chord melody” arrangement, you have a lot of choices when it comes to playing. Obviously, you want the melody to ring out whenever possible. You want the bass line and chords to be noticeable as well, but not to the point of hiding the melody of the song.

So whether or not you’re aware of it, you’re going to have to start to develop a sense of touch in your fingers, getting them to the point where they will stress certain notes, while playing others a little more softly. You can’t have the bass note (almost always played by the thumb) overpower your melody note.

And you will have to make your own decisions when it comes to filling in the spaces that are created by the melody line. You can leave them be, you can add additional notes in the bass, you can add some fancy ornamentation to the melody (making your guitar “sing,” if you will) or you can pick a few notes in the accompanying chord. You can, as you grow as a guitarist, do any combination of these ideas. And that’s not counting coming up with your own personal touches.

For our arrangement of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, I’m leaving things fairly open. You’ll notice that while I give you a specific template in the various examples, I’m also taking a few liberties with the MP3 sound files – adding a note here or there, strumming a full chord in one place even though it’s not detailed in the musical notation / tablature. One of my reasons for choosing this song is because I’m sure many of you are familiar with it. And I think you’ll be able to grasp how these minor variations do not in any way make the song unrecognizable.

Be that as it may, it’s also good to be able to play a melody pretty close to the original version, so in our next example we’ll look at the four measures of the Verse section and try to pay particular attention to the use of anticipation in the phrasing of the melody:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The melody here pretty much hangs around the A (second fret of the G string), B and C notes, and you should find this relatively easy to play as long as you hang on to your Am chord most of the time. Obviously, you’ll need to open up the B string when that note is needed. And if you’ve been practicing the first three chord changes, you’re probably finding playing this a snap so far.

You should probably hear that the shift between the end of the third measure (with the Am/F#) and the fourth one (with the F6) is not all that smooth. This is one reason why you first want to get comfortable with the chord changes, but just as importantly you want to be willing to go with the flow of the song as you’re playing it. You’ll hear me take some liberties with it when we look at the full verse:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Again, you are probably not finding any of this too hard at this point, and that’s kind of the point. The melody hangs fairly close to the open position chord fingerings and there are no real trouble spots to speak of.

You may have noticed that we’ve got two separate full measures of E (measures eight and sixteen) that we’re filling with a simple E arpeggio. The first E chord serves as a “turnaround” back to the Am chord that starts the next line of the song while the second one turns us around to the A chord at the start of the Bridge section. Simple arpeggios, of course, are simply one of many things we can do. And since we’ve been playing descending walking bass lines throughout the rest of the verse, why not add an ascending one here? Here are a couple of possibilities:

If there’s a trick to this, it’s remembering to use your middle finger for all the notes on the low E (sixth) string, as that gives you your index finger for the G# (first fret of the G string) and also allows your ring finger to play the A, A# and B (second, third and fourth frets of the G string, respectively).

These turnarounds become even more important in the Bridge section because we’ve got two full measure of E going on with no melody to speak of. You’ll find that I’ve come up with a slight variation on the second turnaround in our last example for the Bridge:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

And here’s where things get a little more complicated. It starts simply enough, using an open position A chord to get us going. But then we’ve got to move to a C#m chord, which I’ve changed to “C#m7/G#” for our arrangement. Why? The two main reasons are that we’re beginning with an A chord and F#m is the next chord in the progression so using G# (fourth fret of the low E (sixth) string) gives us yet another nice descending bass line. Making it C#m7 also frees up the pinky, which we can then use to play the F# note (seventh fret of the B string) in the melody line.

The F#m in the third measure is usually a full barre chord, but it’s worth noting that if you change it to F#m7 (242222), you then have a finger free to play the B note (shown as the open B string in the notation) at the fourth fret of the G string instead. Those of you “gifted in thumb” might do something a little more interesting and play only part of the chord, using your thumb, obviously, for the F# in the bass (second fret of the low E (sixth) string), your ring finger for the fourth fret of the A string, your ring finger for the fourth fret of the D string and your index finger for the second fret of the B string. This does leave the G string naked and you’ll have to be careful not to hit it accidentally.

Likewise, you can certainly go back to the full C#m barre chord in the next measure, but I find myself, pardon the pun, partial to the voicing of C#m7 that I’ve put in the notation. One of my reasons for preferring this voicing is that you also get the open B string to fool around with during a long pause in the melody line.

I should also point out here that you can also use the open low E (sixth) string as your bass note to continue the descending bass line. But since Bm is our next chord, I think that switching to C# as our bass note made for a nicer transition.

And speaking of that Bm, going with an open position Bm7 voicing (x20202) puts you right on top of all the notes you need for your melody. You don’t even have to finger the F# note at the second fret of the high E (first) string as it’s not part of the melody line. But the open high E string is, so how about that!

In the second measure of Bm (or Bm7 as we have in the example), you’ll notice one of those “melodic ornamentations” I alluded to earlier. In the original song, the melody line simply steps down from C# (second fret of the B string) to B. But I like making it a little fancier, pulling off from C# to the open B and then hitting the A note at the second fret of the G (where my finger just happens to be anyway) and then going back to the B note of the melody. It’s a little touch, and it sounds nice. You, of course, can choose to ignore it or, better yet, come up with something even more interesting on your own.

As noted in the example, you want to play this section twice to make up the whole bridge. You will hear a number of subtle variations between the two runs through the progression on the MP3 file.

And that’s what this is ultimately all about. Here is an MP3 of me going through the Introduction, then the Verse section, then the Bridge and then finally back to the Verse again.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You can find the tablature here: Download gif (Right-click and “Save as”)

The whole of While My Guitar Gently Weeps consists simply of these parts. You can decide to end your arrangement with a fade-out over the Verse (as in the original) or you can go back and do a repeat of the Introduction and finish with an Am chord, or just about anything you find interesting.

I hope you had fun with this lesson on “finger style / chord melody” arrangements. They certainly sound very impressive and, as you’ve (hopefully) discovered, they don’t have to be all that hard to learn.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forum page or email me directly at either dhodge@guitarnoise.com or dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Last time out, we started with a bit of a discussion on the importance of being flexible as a guitarist. Quoting directly, to be able “to change from strumming to a single-note crosspicking pattern or to change from full chords to partial chords or even to chord melody style in midstream can make a big difference in how a song comes across.” This may seem obvious to most of you, but let’s try to drive the point home with this particular lesson.

Just as important, perhaps more so – developing this flexibility will keep you from falling back on the old “must-not-deviate-from-original-strumming-pattern” mentality, which sounds even more ludicrous, by the way, if you can manage to say it with a bit of a James Shatner impression.

Think about this: Most of us pick up the guitar to play songs. If we go out of our way to learn a single part (the strumming guitar) of a song that is done by a whole band, then our playing isn’t going to sound just like the song to begin with. So why get hung up on that when we can usually come up with something a lot more interesting that still sounds like the song we want to play?

Looking at songs as things you can arrange, pardon the pun, will give you the pluck to try out songs that you might dismiss as “beyond” your capabilities. I can’t even begin to tell you how cool it is when you’re listening to a single guitarist perform and he or she totally stuns you by coming up with a song you’ve never heard done before in a single-guitar arrangement.

So without further ado, let’s get down to the task at hand, shall we?

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

In case you didn’t read the title, we’re dipping once again into our Pink Floyd catalogue for this lesson and pulling out the classic ballad Comfortably Numb, originally released on their album The Wall. I’m pretty certain most of you are familiar with the tune, so much so in fact that I’m wondering whether or not I should even discuss the song’s structure.

Better safe than sorry, right? Like our last lesson, Play with Fire, Comfortably Numb is made up of two distinct sections – a “verse” section and a “chorus” section. Some people might like to break the chorus down into two subsections: a “pre-chorus” (starting with the line “…there is no pain…”) and a regular “chorus” (just the final line – “…I have become comfortably numb…”). That seems a little like too much work for me, so we’ll settle for two parts, okay? Laying out the song in the style of a “cheat sheet” or “chord sheet,” and going with very basic chords, it would look like this:

You can see that the two sections have their own chord progressions. The verses are made up of either two or three sets of a Bm – A – G – Em – Bm progression while the chorus goes from D to A twice, C to G twice, back to D and A (again twice) and then back to C and G again (and again, twice). The last line goes from A to C to G and ends on D.

The chorus, beginning with the repeated line of D to A, serves as the backing progression for the first instrumental solo. The last line of the chorus is still sung, though, which leads us back to the verse section again.

Finally, the chord progression of the verse serves as the backing chords for the extended solo of the outro. And that pretty much covers the structure of our song.

Comfortably Numb is played at a rather languid pace; I think it’s around sixty-five beats per minute. This leaves a lot of space for strumming and, during the first verse, Gilmour does very little of it. You can also hear that when he gets to the second Bm (at the point where the lyrics are “…anyone home…”) that he’s not really playing a Bm chord, but something a little more moody and mysterious. Back to that in a moment…

During the second pass at the Verse Section, the strumming is actually more like it was in the chorus section, a bit busier but still steady. Almost like someone managing to get to his feet, perhaps?

Example 1 lays out these two basic strumming patterns for you:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

As you can see and hear, I’ve used the Bm chord for this example but I could have used any of the other chords as well. Speaking of that Bm chord, and we’ve certainly talked about this before, you can use one of three different voicings for it in this song:

The first one is obviously easiest and those of you who are comfortable with the full barre chord version (the third choice) will probably like the way that sounds. I’m going with the second one for now, because of what we’re going to do next. But before we go on, this would be a good place to point out that you can now play this song. Seriously. You’ve got the basic chords and some simple, yet effective, strumming patterns. What more do you need?

Wants, however, are a totally different matter. And we’re working on a single guitar arrangement of our song, perhaps we want to play Comfortably Numb with a few more interesting touches than simply being locked into a strumming pattern throughout the whole tune.

So what I’m proposing is that we take a number of ideas from our various Guitar Noise Podcasts, things like combining strumming and crosspicking (from GN Podcast #8) or even the sixteenth note accent from way back in GN Podcast #4 and put them into play. We can even use a little bit of our bass line work. In fact, if you’ve read the very first lesson on walking bass lines, Connecting the Dots, you’ll see that we’ll put Examples 8 and 10 from that lesson to good use in this one.

Before we do, though, let’s go back and look at the “mysterious” sounding Bm chord that Gilmour plays at the end of the verse progressions. It’s a Bm chord where the D note (third fret of the B string) has been replaced with C# (second fret of the B string), giving what us what most guitarists would call a Bsus2 chord and it would look like this, if you were using the “second choice” voicing of Bm as a starting point;

Alright, then, I think we’re ready to come up with an interesting “template” for the verse chord progression. After doing a bit of playing around and experimenting, I’ve hit upon this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

That’s certainly a lot more interesting than just strumming around. The first measure starts with a Bm chord, but I’ve left the high E (first) string open so that I can hammer onto the second fret to get the F# note to complete the chord. There’s a bit of sneakiness in that on my part, too. Since that F# note is the note of the start of the melody, I usually find myself trying to find it and often slide up to it from E. So this little hammer-on helps me to find the melody line right from the start. For the third and fourth beats of the measure, I use simple upstroke arpeggios, removing my finger from the high E (first) string again to get a more interesting final arpeggio to contrast with the one of the third beat.

I like the combination of strumming, hammer-ons and arpeggios in the first measure so much that I use it again in the second measure for the A chord. The first beat begins with what some folks call “Asus2,” which is just an A chord with no finger on the B string. I hammer-on the second fret of the B string and also catch the full A chord on the upstroke. And since we’ve been doing okay with the hammer-ons, why not give the pull-offs some equal time? You’ll find one in the last arpeggio that occurs on the fourth beat of this measure.

Since the G to Em transition that occurs in the third measure is dramatic, the easiest thing to do is to emphasize it by keeping the rest of the strumming in this measure relatively sparse. Those of you with sharp ears may hear that I’m sometimes catching a few extra notes on this short descending bass line. This is done by hitting all three of the low strings while playing it:

The thing to watch out for here is that you want to mute the A string when you go for the F# note (second fret of the low E) in the bass. Simply lifting your finger that is already sitting there at the second fret just enough to dampen the A string should do the trick.

Another thing to notice is that we’re what might be a different voicing of the G chord that some of you may not have come across before (although some of you do recognize it, I’m sure, from other lessons here at Guitar Noise). Having the D note (third fret of the B string) allows you to just leave it there when you play your Em. This added D note turns the Em into an Em7, which gives the chord a more interesting feel. You’ll hear on the last MP3 file that I strummed this Em7 chord very close to the bridge of the guitar, giving the strum a little more of a ‘ghostly” effect. Using a technique such as this every now and then can also make a song more interesting to your listeners. Not to mention to yourself!

Because the third measure is practically all strumming, it kind of makes sense to follow that up with a measure that is nothing but single picked notes. In my playing around, I discovered that I liked the arpeggios I could create by leaving the high E (first) string open while playing the Bsus2. This creates another weird chord that I’ve chosen to call “Bsus2sus4″ just to keep the “Dadd2add4″ used in our Easy Songs for Beginners lesson on Man on the Moon company. If you finger the chord using your ring finger on the fourth fret of the D string, your pinky on the fourth fret of the G string and your index finger on second fret of the B, that will free up your index finger to perform the hammer-on and pull-off at the third fret of the B string.

So far, so good? As always, it’s important to note here that this “template” is merely a suggestion. There is no end to the ideas that you can come up with and while you’re playing you may certainly come across more than one or two that sound good. It also goes without saying that there’s no reason to make things more complicated than you have to. If you can only sing while strumming simply, and if you’re the only one singing and playing, then you have to go with what you’re capable of. But do yourself a favor and keep trying out adding little touches here and there. As you gain more confidence in your abilities, you’ll find yourself able to put your practice into your performance.

And this is important to remember when we get to the chorus. If I’m not handling the singing duties when playing, I like to use the guitar to add the wonderful keyboard arpeggios that are part of the hook of the chorus. When singing, though, that makes thing a bit difficult. Sometimes a compromise is in order.

For instance, the notes of the D arpeggio in the first measure of the chorus, along with the tablature you’ll often find both online and in “guitar tablature edition” books of Pink Floyd music are:

This certainly sounds fine. But if you’re more partial to the sound of ringing strings, you might find this interpretation of the same notes more up your alley:

You might recognize this particular voicing of the D chord from many of our other song lessons and articles here at Guitar Noise. For more about figuring out how to come up with a different chord voicing yourself, check out Moving On Up or Multiple Personality Disorders; both articles are certainly worthy of your attention. The easiest way to finger this, by the way, is to use your index finger for the fifth fret of the high E (first) string, your pinky on the seventh fret of the B string and your ring finger on seventh fret of the G string.

And we’ve not mentioned it yet, but if you decide to play Comfortably Numb on a twelve-string guitar (no reason not to!), this particular technique will sound very cool.

Back to the point – borrowing the lines from the keyboard is a great idea, but if you’re not able to handle it and sing, there’s no reason to abandon it all together. After all, during each of the measures of A, you’re only singing on the first beat. Likewise the first two measures of G in the chorus section. So, strumming the D’s and C’s while playing arpeggios on the A’s and G’s should work out fine. In the following example, I’ve written out each of the chord changes as arpeggios, but on the MP3 you’ll hear the example played twice – once with all arpeggios and once with alternating strumming and arpeggios:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The A and G arpeggios vary slightly from the original recording. Actually the A is an exact copy of the second pass on the recording while the G is different in that I’ve changed the notes used in order to take the best advantage of the guitar’s two open high strings. If you’re playing with someone who’s got that part covered, then you obviously don’t have to worry about it. If you’re on your own, might as well make things easier on you. Chances are likely that if I hadn’t told you it was different, you might not have even noticed. You’re still using the flavor of the song and that will often carry you through.

For the second pass through the D, A, D, A, C, G, C, G of the chorus, I want to give the music more of a push, so I go for all strumming (and these are all just slight variations of the “possible chorus” strumming from Example 1) but I punch things up by adding a sixteenth note accent at the last half of the fourth beat of the previous measure, like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Again, and you’re undoubtedly tired of hearing this by now, this is also just a suggestion. You can use these sixteenth note accents in combination with arpeggios or with different strumming patterns or not use them at all. This is, after all, your call as arranger. You are the one who knows what you can (or can’t) play at this point in your guitar playing adventure.

You might also hear in the last MP3 example that I manage to find the melody notes of the very last phrase of lyric (“…have become comfortably numb…”) in much the same way we found the melody line of Play with Fire. To accomplish this, I need to change the last C to Cadd9, which means adding the pinky to the third fret of the B string in order to get the D note of the melody. And then, after a bit of careful picking with the G chord, I finished things off with first a partial D chord, using just the A, D and G strings, and then a full D, strummed as close to the bridge of the guitar as possible in order to quiet things down a bit for the second verse.

And that’s pretty much everything. You’re good to go! I hope you’ve had fun with this lesson. The main thing to remember is that Comfortably Numb is a song where your playing carries a lot of emotional weight, so why sit on a robotic strumming pattern that displays none?

And for those who noticed that I totally ignored the solo between the first chorus and the second verse, don’t worry. Time permitting (although that might mean sometime after August), I will write out a single guitar arrangement for that to help you out.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

This one came a little while back via email:

Dear David,

I love your site – and your lessons and your arrangements and ideas for changing the keys of songs and different rhythms to try. I was inspired to buy a twelve string by your article “Double Your Pleasure” and I listen to your great podcasts. As experimentation is something that seems to inspire you as it does me, I wondered if I could ask for your input with something I am working on and not many people seem to be able to help me with…

I love the rather simple song “All I Can Do Is Write About It” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. But as I’m Scottish and now living in America, I thought I’d change a few of the words to make the song about Scotland rather than the American south. Then I also thought to make it sound a bit more Celtic, it might be worth putting into DADGAD…

The chord progression is really simple: G D C; G D Em C, G D C C.

Do you think I can just play those chords in DADGAD or if I retune to DADGAD is there an equally good sounding progression or a transposed set of chords that you have experience with that would sound better in that tuning – while obviously keeping the same rhythm and feel as the original…just with a Celtic twang, if you will…

Your thoughts would be gratefully recieved…

Now it’s been ages since I’ve heard this song, which if I remember correctly is the closing number off Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gimme Back My Bullets album, and the idea not only intrigued me but it seemed like a cool thing to do for Saint Patrick’s Day (although I’m not sure I’m going to make it by then!). So I sat down and worked up some ideas and here is a quick lesson that came out of that bit of brainstorming. Of course, we’ve got to go through the usual formalities:

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

First things first, as mentioned in the email, the song is indeed very simple in terms of structure and chords. Not counting the solo between the second and third verse, there are two different sets of two-measure chord progressions. The first, which we’ll call “Progression A” is two beats each of G, D, Em and C. The second set, “Progression B” if you will, is two beats each of G and D, followed by four beats of C.

Pairing one “Progression A” with one “Progression B” will give you two lines of the first verse, as you can see here:

The introduction of All I Can Do is Write About It is also made up of one pair of these two progressions. Immediately following the first half of the first verse, “Progression B” is then played by itself, serving as a short interlude between the two halves of the first verse (you could technically call these two separate verses – that’s up to you).

The chorus of the song, as well as all the subsequent verses follows a different structure. First you play “Progression B” twice, then “Progression A” and then you tack on one last “Progression B” to finish things off. Here’s the way the chorus parses out:

The very last time the chorus is played, the final line ends with a single Em chord, played once and held instead of playing the full measure of C. And that pretty much takes care of both the chords and the song structure.

And that means it’s time to tackle the chords. I assumed (correctly it turns out, and that’s fortunate because otherwise we’d be having a chat about that word “assume”) that the reader wanted to play and sing this song at the same time, so instead of going for full chords, I went with embellished chords that (a) were relatively easy to finger and (b) allowed access both to open strings as well as potential hammer-ons and pull-offs that would help give the song that “Celtic twang” the reader was looking for.

My thinking was this – in order to sing and play the song at the same time, you’re going to want to have an arrangement that you can play pretty much on auto-pilot. The less you’re worried about the playing, the more you can enjoy the song and also come up with all sorts of other trills and frills.

So here are the chords, displayed both in chord charts and guitar tablature:

Having the chords and the structure, all that was left was to come up with a Celtic feel to playing the chords. If you’ve read A Celtic Air, one of the old Guitar Columns here at Guitar Noise, you know that there are many aspects to giving an arrangement a Celtic feel. Being tuned in DADGAD is one way of doing that, but using a lot of droning notes, not to mention a generous helping of hammer-ons and pull-offs, also can help.

But if you’ve ever listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s original version of this song, or to any song of Skynyrd’s for that matter, you know that their guitarists are constantly using hammer-ons and pull-offs. It’s part of their signature sound.

So we have to come up with something else, and I chose to go with rhythm. Most Celtic pieces have a swing to them; it’s rare for a reel or jig to not have a triplet feel. Yes, this will make our arrangement of the song a little more difficult, but it will also make it feel a lot more Celtic and less Southern Rock Ballad.

In order to do this, I re-arranged the time signature of All I Can Do Is Write About It, going with 6 / 8 timing instead of 4 / 4. This gives us an intrinsic triplet feel. It’s all a matter of the “pulse” of a song. Normally, we think of 4 / 4 timing as having the following sense of pulse:

In 6 / 8 timing, our pulse is gotten by counting the beats in the following manner:

In 6 / 8 time, even though each eighth note technically gets a beat, the convention is to think of the dotted quarter note (which is made up of three eighth notes) as the pulse, giving each measure two pulses that can, in turn, be neatly divided into three. This is why when you see a song in 6 /8 timing, the BPM will usually indicate the dotted quarter note getting the BPM count and not the eighth note or quarter note. In other words, you get one triplet set for each click of the metronome.

And because we’re looking at chord changes that take place every two beats, I want to subdivide the pulse even further, mostly in order to give myself more room in which to play:

Here we’re using three sixteenth notes (and not sixteenth note triplets, as I say on the first MP3 files – good help is so hard to find!) for each half-beat, giving up six sixteenth notes to play around with when we get ‘round to creating our riffs, which should be any moment now…

I hope you’ve followed along with me this far, because now we’re getting to the fun part! Since there are only four chords, all we have to do is come up with a cool, Celtic sounding pattern for each of our chords. For whatever reason, when I was working this out I was using a pick. It just happened that way. So you can definitely play this with a pick (and I do in the MP3 sound files), or use your fingers if you prefer. Here’s what I came up with for the G chord:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

For the fingering, I suggest using your middle finger on the sixth (now low D, as we’re in DADGAD tuning) string, while your ring finger plays the regular D (fourth) string and the index finger handles the chores on the G (third) string.

I came up with this particular pattern after a bit of playing around. Giving it a bit of breathing space, that is, not filling it entirely with sixteenth notes, made this seem, to my ears anyway, as fairly playful and slightly mysterious and also allowed for no end of possible variations (one of which you can see and hear in the last example) should I really get into things. That’s important to me. If I’ve a pattern that has to be played precisely in sequence for the duration of a song, chances are very likely I’m going to botch it at some point. So having a pattern that can be slightly scramble on occasion is a big plus as it allows me freedom to screw up and still carry on with the song.

And having a little bit of space where I could add in more sixteenth notes, again as you hear on the variation, means that the number of possible variations can be quite high.

For the D chord, I could have gone with many other options, but I liked this one best:

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Mostly, I enjoyed using the hammer-on of the F# on the D string. There’s a big tendency, when playing in DADGAD, to use D5 chords instead true D chords. Making this one a little more embellished by adding the B and G notes on the G (third) string appealed a lot to me for some reason.

Now let’s look at a pattern for the Em chord;

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As with the G chord, I added a single variation to this particular pattern, but there are even more possibilities with the Em than with the G, especially with this fingering. You can get many more notes, from the low B at the second fret of the A (fifth) string to the E note at the second fret of the first (now high D) string. You should play around a lot with this pattern, as you should with the C:

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Again, I cannot stress enough how you should make the time to experiment and try to come up with your own variations. I choose these particular patterns by thinking, “what could I play and still manage to sing this song at the same time?” and your answer will (hopefully) be a little different than mine.

And you will hear that, when playing this without thinking too much about it, I ended up with even more variations than I’d planned. Please notice that I ended this final MP3 file with a simple G 6 / 9 chord (550000 in DADGAD) simply because, at the time of recording this, I wasn’t even aware that I was going to write a whole lesson around what I came up with! Using Em7 (220020) or even leaving the second (A) string open (220000) will work as well.

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In the original recording, there is a solo before the last verse, played after a brief change to the key of A. The chords are A (two beats), D (two beats) and E (four beats) and this progression is played four times. For our arrangement, I decided to simply leave out the solo. Maybe the next spot of spare time I get I’ll come up with something and then update this lesson!

I hope you had fun with this lesson on arrangements. It’s a lot of fun, not to mention occasionally challenging, to come up with an arrangement that’s different enough from the original yet still pays homage to the sentiment of the song. And it’s always a treat to hear people come up with arrangements because it can be a real eye (and ear) opener that inspires you to get a little more creative.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forum page or email me directly at either dhodge@guitarnoise.com or dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

You may not think that lead guitarists have to concern themselves with rhythm, but you’d be dead wrong. Rhythm sets up the whole concept of phrasing and phrasing is what makes a solo sound like a solo and not someone practicing a scale.

And now this bit from the fourth lesson, Combining the Major Scale with the Minor Pentatonic:

…let’s take a brief step sideways to think a moment about what makes music interesting. At its heart, music is a constant shift between disharmony and harmony, what’s generally referred to in terms of “tension and resolution.” Good melodies, for example, don’t simply use notes taken from the chords of the chord progression of a song. It’s the interplay of the melodic notes against the chord progression that creates this give-and-take of tension and resolution.

Solos do this as well. Otherwise all soloing would be nothing but chord arpeggios. And we would be reading a lesson on “Turning Arpeggios into Solos” and not “Turning Scales into Solos!”

Alright then, let’s chat about “target notes.” And to do that, I’m going to quote Guitar Noise Moderator Wes Inman, who recently made a great post about this concept on the Guitar Noise Forum:

I am a big believer in “target notes.” This is when you pick specific notes to play over specific chords in your progression. I don’t like to play notes nilly willy; I like the solo to lead the listener’s ear. This is a method that will help you pull off a good solo every time, but it is not something you want to do every solo. You don’t want to sound like you are using a method. So, think of it as a tool. Once you get familiar with these target notes, you will remember them when you are improvising.

Now I’d like you to do me a favor. You’re going to use the same chord progression that served as our “backing track” in the first two lessons on this series (C to Am to F to G) and improvise a little solo, using the C major pentatonic scale. For those of you who may have forgotten it, here are the notation and tablature to help you out:

Chances are likely that when you’re playing this, you don’t run into a lot of tension or dissonance. That’s one of the reasons why the pentatonic scale is such a popular tool for a soloist. Remember that the notes that make up these chords are as follows:

The notes of the C major pentatonic scale are C, D, E, G and A. That gives you all three notes of the first two chords in our progression – C (C, E and G) and Am (A, C and E), plus two notes each of the F chord (A and C) and G chord (G and D). These notes, when played over the chords which they are a part of, are your safe notes.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg, if you’ll pardon the cliché. And this is also where having either a little chord theory or a lot of listening experience will come in handy. You might know from your own reading or experience, or by availing yourself of the many wonderful articles here at Guitar Noise, that you can add just about any note to a major or minor chord and come up with an embellished chord, such as a sixth or seventh or major seventh. If you want to catch up quickly on this idea, then give Building Additions (and Suspensions) a read.

Now let’s look one more time at our C minor pentatonic notes and examine how they relate to the chords they are not a part of. C, for instance, is part of the C chord (it’s the root), the Am chord (it’s the third) and the F chord (it’s the fifth). It’s not a part of the G chord. In relation to the G chord, C is the eleventh. More important to the soloist, playing a C while the backing personnel are playing a G chord gives the impression of turning the G chord into Gsus4. This is especially true if the backing people are playing G5 (the G power chord, if you will).

So give a listen to what I do in this MP3 example:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Here I’m using C fairly constantly, but I’m especially emphasizing it as my target over the G chord and I hang on to it when the chord then changes to C. This is known as sustaining a note. We’ve talked about this before in respect to chords (check out the article Sustained Tones: An Animated Discussion for more in regard to chords) but here we’re using single notes from the soloist to create the sustained chord. Cool, no?

You can, of course, do this with other notes from the C major pentatonic scale. Let’s look at each and see how it relates to the other chords that they are not already a part of:

• D is the ninth of C, the fourth of Am, and the sixth of F
• E is the major seventh of F and the sixth of G
• G is the seventh of Am and the ninth of F
• A is the sixth of C and the ninth of G

So now I’m going to try another solo over our progression, this time deliberately targeting notes that are not part of chords and then holding those notes out over a chord change. Maybe two…

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I don’t know about you, but to me this is beginning to sound a little more polished. It’s certainly more interesting than targeting only my “safe notes.” And, obviously, things get even more interesting should you decide to go from using the C major pentatonic scale to playing the full C major scale, which adds the F and B notes:

• F is the fourth of C, the sixth of Am, and the seventh of G
• B is the major seventh of C, the ninth of Am, and the flatted fifth (a blue note) of F. And, as you already know, it’s the third of G

Having all the notes of the C major scale at our disposal will create even more interesting target notes when playing over our chord progression. In case you’ve forgotten where the C major scale is, here’s a reminder:

And here is a brief example of using all these notes over a solo:

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This final solo sounds, again to my ears, even better than the last one. There’s a lot of interesting things going on and while I am simply using a basic scale pattern, it doesn’t sound like someone just tossing out a scale and hoping it can masquerade as a solo.

One vital aspect about using sustained notes as part of your soloing technique is that it forces you to hang onto a note, to breathe, to create a phrase instead of simply plastering the allotted space with every note available. The solo becomes something that, as Wes aptly put it, “leads the listener’s ear.” There’s an art to what’s known in music theory as “voice leading,” and good guitarists are always aware of that. It’s part of what can make a solo memorable.

As always, here is a backing track so that you can practice creating your own magic:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Next time out, we get back in step with modes, looking on various ways to spot clues in chord progressions that will help you determine which scale might work best as a choice for soloing.

Also, we’ll get to see firsthand the trap that we’ve led ourselves into by our very practicing of scales. Interested?

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next time…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Targeting in on a Mode – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
• Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8

As a guitar teacher, I am wary of absolutes. Anytime I catch myself wanting to say “always,” I know that there’s going to be an exception to that. Likewise with “either / or” choices, as I’ve mentioned on occasion here at Guitar Noise. Should you play with a pick or with your fingers? Should you start on electric or acoustic guitar? Do you begin by reading tablature or notation? The answer to any of these, should you happen to ask me, will always (hah!) be a resounding “yes.”

As a guitarist, as a musician, I know that the ability to be flexible, to change from strumming to a single-note crosspicking pattern or to change from full chords to partial chords or even to chord melody style in midstream can make a big difference in how a song comes across. So even when I’m learning a specific technique, part of me is thinking about how to be able to turn that new technique on and off at will and how to be able to integrate it into what I already can do.

None of that, by the way, is supposed to make you wonder whether or not this particular lesson is going to be harder than the usual “Easy Songs for Beginners” Lessons here at Guitar Noise. Far from it! Rather, I just want to prepare you for doing something you’ve not tried before and while it is something fairly simple and easy, it may take a little getting used to!

So onward then, shall we?

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

Today’s selected lesson is Play With Fire, originally the “B” side of The Last Time, released almost exactly forty-four years ago (don’t get me started about where the time goes!). It’s a spare, acoustic song that will lend itself well to some interesting arranging work, using an interesting technique that essentially reverses the way you’re probably most used to playing guitar as yet. Hang in there and I’ll hopefully explain along the way.

In terms of structure, Play With Fire is about as simple as they come. There’s a verse section and a chorus. The chorus also serves as the introduction and as an interlude between the second and third verse. And you repeat the chorus a second time at the end, so I guess you could also think of it as the outro. It’s in 4 / 4 timing at a moderate pace of, say, one hundred and twelve beats per minute. And there are only four chords – Em, G, D and C.

To make matters easier, the entire verse, all eight measures of it, is sung over an Em chord. So you could take a simple strumming pattern, like this one I conveniently have here:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

With this we can do the whole song. Remember that the verse is eight measures (four beats each) of Em. The chorus starts out with two beats of G, then two beats of D, then two more beats of G, two beats of C and finally eight beats (two measures) of Em:

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Not much of a lesson, is it?

So where shall we start? This may seem like old hat to some of you, and I’m sure you’re tired of hearing me say it, but the melody of a song is almost always a great place to find ideas and inspiration. And this song is, probably not surprisingly, not an exception. In fact, if we look at the melody line and see how it fits on the guitar, we may make an interesting discovery:

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Guess what? There are only four melody notes and two of them are open strings! And here’s another gift – the two non-open-string notes, D (third fret of the B string) and G (third fret of the high E (first) string) are easily reached when playing an E minor chord. So let’s try and go about fitting them into our chord pattern. We could choose many ways to do this, such as in the following examples. By the way, these snippets only use the first two lines (four measures) of the verse in order to give you a taste:

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Our “first idea” is a typical beginner chord melody approach, pretty much going with a full chord strum with each melody note. A little heavy handed, but it works.

The “second idea” actually borrows from the original recording, using the Travis picking / pinch technique we’ve discussed in several relatively recent articles. It’s actually a lot sparser than even the original recording, but should be easy enough for you to get a handle on. First just use your thumb to get used to alternating between the open low E (sixth) string and the E note at the second fret of the D string every beat. Then add in the melody, using either your index or middle finger. Or you can use both fingers to play the melody notes, playing any note on the high E (first) string with your middle finger and any note on the B string with your index.

And if the style of the “third idea: seems familiar, it’s because we’ve used that in our After the Gold Rush lesson (and good for you, by the way, for venturing into the Intermediate Song Lessons page! Some of them are not as hard as you think they might be). We’re going to go with this one for today’s lesson because while it may sound easy, it’s going to take a little bit getting used to.

There are two main reasons I want to use this technique. First, it’s even and steady. You probably heard in the last example that it takes a few liberties with the timing of the melody line and that’s okay here because we’re not strictly playing a chord melody style. We’re actually the accompaniment and someone should be singing. Shadowing the melody in this fashion allows a bit of tension between the voice and the accompaniment, letting the voice weave in and out between the beats while we’re keeping things smooth and steady on the guitar.

The second reason is that we can use some of the pauses of the melody to play short arpeggio fills, especially at the end of the fourth and eighth measures. We’ll also tack on a short walking bass line at the very end of the verse, leading from E to F# on the low E (sixth) string, which will take us to the G note that will start the chorus.

Basically the “third idea” takes the familiar “bass note / chord” style of playing that we’ve used in lessons like Folsom Prison Blues and turns it around. We play the chord or partial chord on the higher strings first right on the beat and then add our bass note, which is usually the root note of the chord on the offbeat. Now here’s the tricky part: the easiest way to play this is to start with an upstroke. Instead of the typical down-up-down-up pattern that we play without thinking, we’re going to have to reverse our stroke. So do yourself a favor and start out slowly. Here we go:

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Again, I can’t stress enough to take things slowly. Only work the first two measures for starters. Once you’re comfortable with playing in this manner, then add the third measure (which should be a snap since it’s a repeat of the first one) and then tackle the fourth measure. It’s a very simple Em arpeggio, you don’t even have to lift your fingers, just go straight down the strings one at a time and then back to the B string. The last two notes again mirror the melody at that point of the song.

This may seem like a very minor thing, almost an afterthought really, but here you’re learning to snap out of your pattern, to take a (very) short deviation before getting back to it. This is the flexibility I was talking about at the very beginning of this lesson. At first it will seem weird but you’ll get better at it with each pass.

Speaking of mirroring the melody, we’re going to do the same thing in the chorus, but this time we’ll place the melody all the way down in the bass notes of the guitar and add some basic straight arpeggios:

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Using the melody line as our bass puts us in a sort of “good news / bad news” scenario. The good news is that the initial G chord, as well at the G/B at the start of the second measure, are essentially one-fingered chords. If we’re careful with our picking, we can play both these chords using only one finger. The C chord at the last half of the second measure also poses no problems.

That means the bad news is the D chord at the end of the first measure. Technically, it’s got the A note of the open A string as our combination melody-and-bass note and we could make this easier on ourselves by using D5/A, which is fingered exactly like your regular open position D only you don’t play either E string (X0023X).

But this is a lesson and you’re supposed to be learning new things and taking on new challenges, so I’ve made the decision of playing a D chord with the F# note at the third fret of the D string. Probably the easiest way to finger this for most of you will be to use your ring finger for this F# note while your index finger gets the A (second fret of the G string) and your middle finger plays the D (third fret of the B string). And there’s a nice little arpeggio at the end that uses a pull-off from that D note on the B string to the open B string itself.

As mentioned earlier, the chorus, besides just being the chorus, is also used as the introduction and as an interlude, a (very) short instrumental break between the second and third verses. Plus the chorus is done twice after the fourth verse.

I have no qualms about using the chorus as the introduction; it’s distinctive and anyone who knows the song will be able to figure out what I’m playing. But playing it a total of seven times (four times with each of the four verses, plus as an introduction, an interlude and an outro) seems a bit much. We only do the verses four times, and that’s a lot!

So why not come up with a different arrangement for the chorus that can be used for the interlude and outro? And why not use the same style of “chord / bass note” playing that we’ve been doing so well with so far in the verses? Maybe something like this:

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The first line here you should recognize as the end of the chorus. It’s there because, at least according to the song structure we’re using, we’ll be playing this after the second verse and chorus and then again after the fourth verse and chorus. So it makes sense to see how it ties into the song. The F# note (fourth fret of the D string) is the pick-up note; if we were singing it would be the syllable “don’t” right before the “play” that starts the chorus.

Normally making the stretch to the fourth fret of the D string might be a tad worrisome, but remember that the note immediately before it is the open low E (sixth) string. That gives us plenty of time to move our fingers to be in place.

We’ll use the same chords that we did for the first chorus, but this time we’ll pick them in the same style that we use for the majority of the verses. Because the initial melody notes are on the G string, we’ll have to be a bit careful with our upstroke, making certain we miss the high E (first) and B strings. As I said, this is a lesson, so where would we be without techniques to practice?

And speaking of new things, there’s that pesky D/A again. Use the same fingering that you did on the regular chorus. It should work nicely. And if you truly are having a hard time, remember that the D5/A chord discussed earlier (X0023X) is still an option.

Finally, it’s no secret to anyone who’s heard me play that I am a big fan of using harmonics. So getting in a couple of natural harmonics, found at the twelfth fret of the B and high E (first) string, at the very end of this phrase sounds good to me. You can, as always, feel free to omit them if you’d like.

Alright, then, you’re good to go! Don’t forget that, as with all our song lessons here at Guitar Noise, this is meant to be a template, a starting point from which you can play around and experiment with different variations of your own choosing. You’ll soon get to the point where you’ll want to incorporate more of the syncopation from the verses, which means making some appropriate adjustments in the rest of your strumming pattern. You’ll hear a little bit of that in this final MP3:

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I hope you’ve had fun with this lesson. Coming right on the heels of Hey There Delilah, it’s almost like taking two steps forward, then taking two exact steps in reverse yet still ending up four steps ahead of where you started!

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Let’s start with a brief discussion on the philosophy of being a “beginner.” There are, literally, millions if not hundreds of millions of people who at one point in time are beginners at musical instruments, say, like the guitar. There will be, therefore, hundreds of millions of definitions as to what, exactly, a beginner is. Some beginners need to be shown everything. Others will take a single basic principle and then come up with all sorts of insights on their own. In other words, what distinguishes one beginner from another is often a matter of personality rather than of the label of “beginner.”

Likewise with the word “easy.” If you have read any of our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons here at Guitar Noise, you have hopefully learned (or at least strongly suspected) that we would like you to learn things besides the songs being taught in these lessons. The songs are usually, in fact, delivery vehicles for the use of music theory or various guitar techniques that you are encouraged to use in all your playing.

Bearing that in mind, I’d like to also borrow something that I wrote in our last issue of Guitar Noise News, the free twice-a-month newsletter of Guitar Noise, dated January 16, 2009:

Something that I should let you know right from the start, though, is that there is no set order or “lesson plan” when it comes to the articles and lessons at Guitar Noise. You see, the odd thing (or one of the odd things) about our website is that it didn’t start out to be a tutorial site. Just kind of grew into one. When I first started writing here (back in 1999), the object was to write about what people asked for or seemed interested in.

Because of this, we don’t have a “lesson plan,” and yes, we know that makes things a little difficult. Problem is, with over two million readers a month, it’s hard to write for everyone’s specific desires.

The “Easy Songs for Beginners” are numbered, but that’s strictly chronological. And I’ve been adding new lessons, such as Eleanor Rigby and Folsom Prison Blues/Your Cheatin’ Heart, that can easily fit in between some of the very earliest lessons.

I do try, whenever and wherever possible, to add other lessons for “cross referencing.” but you should always feel free to write and ask if it seems like you’ve missed a page in the discussion at hand.

So I guess the upshot of all this, big surprise, is that some things a beginner goes through are going to be harder than others. Some people pick up on some techniques and ideas faster than others; it stands to reason that some “Beginners” lessons will be harder for some people than others. And some that may seem beyond one’s grasp may come fairly quickly with a little bit of (gasp!) practice and work. There’s a cool flip side to this – some of you may find that certain of the “Songs for Intermediates” lessons are nowhere near as difficult as you may be thinking they are. This is one reason why I always encourage students to reach out and try songs and techniques that might be currently beyond their levels. As long as one doesn’t get frustrated in the attempt, it almost always yields positive results, although those results may be a bit down the road.

And that bring us to today’s lesson, Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T’s. As a song lesson, this tune gives us a chance to develop some picking techniques that will be very helpful to beginners whether they use fingers or picks. Plus there are a few tricky chord changes that, once you’ve gotten them into your fingers, can give you a lot of confidence for trickier ones that you’ll undoubtedly come across at some point in your guitar lives. It might even give you a reason to try some of the Intermediate song lessons here at Guitar Noise.

So let’s get on with it, shall we?

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

This might be a good time to mention that another reason this song is a good exercise is that the rhythm is constant throughout. Every measure, with one or two exceptions, will be filled with eight eighth notes that alternate between a bass note and a partial chord using just the G and B strings. So it’s also a good way to work on your string-picking accuracy.

Hey There Delilah starts out with a short introduction and then has a fairly standard song structure of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, final verse and chorus. It’s in 4/4 timing and it’s played in the key of D major. The verses themselves are easily broken down into two sections of chord progressions. The first section, which is a measure of D and then one of F#m, is also used as the introduction:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

And, as you can hear in the first MP3 file, it sounds fine whether you use your fingers or a pick. Some people may like using both thumb and fingers on the partial chords, some may like the “one finger sweep,” that is, using one finger and striking both the B and G strings on the upstroke. I’ll be using the “two fingers” approach for the rest of this lesson, simply because I prefer the way it sounds.

Another thing to mention here is that, technically, we’re playing a D5 chord instead of a full D, so you don’t have to finger the entire open D chord and can leave the first (high E) string open.

Speaking of fingering, this simple progression might prove to be one of the more challenging parts of this song for some of you. And if you don’t mind a suggestion, try laying your index finger flat in a “mini-barre,” covering the first three strings at the second fret. This way you won’t have to move very much to make the change between these two chords. I usually use my ring finger to get the D note (third fret of the B string) on the D5 chord and then my pinky to get the F# note (fourth fret, D string) on the F#m. Those of you with larger hands may prefer to employ your middle and ring fingers, respectively, for those tasks, but since this progression lasts a while, I find it helps to have my middle finger help support the index finger in the barre by lying on top of it!

I really want to stress that even though this progression may seem hard at first, you will get it with practice, persistence and patience. And there’s every reason to get good at this as you’ll find this particular fingering shape used a lot, both in chording and lead guitar work, not to mention many chord melody arrangements. So please keep at it!

But if you want immediate gratification, then you can use the “alternate F#m choice” shown in Example 1A. Wrapping your thumb around to get the F# bass note at the second fret of the low E (sixth) string is probably the easiest way for most folks to get this.

The second section of the verse is four measures long and moves from Bm to G to A, and then back to Bm and A again. The good news here, because of this particular picking pattern, is that we don’t have to deal with any type of barring in regard to the Bm chord. Oh! There’s also a slight descending walking bass line at the end of the first measure, which most guitarists prefer to think of as Bm/A;

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And it’s really interesting to wonder why we’d call it a Bm/A at all since we’re only playing the A note in the bass instead of playing both the bass note and then the rest of the chord! Of course, you’ll hear me make the mistake of playing the rest of the chord anyway on one of the MP3 files. That’s why it’s always a good idea to have your chord shapes in place even if you’re not planning on hitting those strings.

The trickiest part here is the final A5. Since you’re all into reading music and / or you know your fretboards fairly well, then you already have figured out that the E note on the fifth fret of the B string is the same E note as your open high E (first) string. So you can certainly just hit that note if you’d rather. But going with that mini-barre on the second fret will allow you to both get the fifth fret of the B string with your pinky and still be in great shape for when you get back to the D5 that starts the second half of the verse.

And speaking of the second half of the verse, why don’t we put an entire verse together so that you can see how they work:

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So far, so good! The chorus consists of a two chord progression of D5 to Bm and tosses in some bass movement to make things a little more interesting:

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Not only does it make things more interesting, but using only the open A note in the bass for the D5/A is as convenient a gift for your fingering that you could ever hope for! It gives you a nice quiet moment in order to get your fingers set for the two upcoming Bm chords.

Here, I’d like to suggest not using the mini-barre on the D5. Fret the D note (third fret of the B string) with your middle finger and play the A (second fret of the G string) with your index. When you hit the open A string, reposition your index finger to play the B note in the bass (second fret of the A string) and also get your pinky set to play the B note on the fourth fret of the G string. This will free up your ring finger to get the C# note in the Bm/C# that’s coming along. There are certainly other ways to try this, but I think most of you will find this to be the easiest.

This two-measure chord progression is played four times in the chorus. The first time through the chorus ends with one last measure of D5 (along with the D5/A) before going back to the verse chords.

The second time through the chorus there is a slight change at the end of it, using Bm/A instead of Bm/C#. This leads us from B down to G, which happens to be the chord that starts out the bridge:

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The bridge of Hey There Delilah is an excellent example of the sort of simple bass lines you add to almost any song in the key of D major or B minor. Those of you who’ve read our articles on walking bass lines here at Guitar Noise probably recognize this as what I like to call “connecting the dots,” simply moving from one root note to the next. Be careful, though! Notice that while the first shift from D5 to Bm involves the same D5/A used in the chorus, the second time D5/C# comes into play. This might be another good time to use your mini-barre, which should give your pinky ample room to get that C# note in the bass.

I’m beginning to wonder if I should have made the mini-barre itself the focal point of the lesson, especially since you’ll want to use it again at the end of the third verse. As mentioned ages ago, the last verse is slightly different in structure than the others. It’s nothing you can’t handle, though, as long as you read it carefully:

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Here we go through pretty much the first half of the verse only to get caught in a Bm to Bm/A to G to A loop for a little bit. Finally, though, we get out to the Bm, A and A5 progression that ends the verse. Be sure to notice that both the last A and A5 get a full four beats each instead the two they had in the previous verses.

The final chorus is also longer. It starts out the same but continues on for an additional five times while the vocal is singing a lot of “ohs” and “whoas” and whatnot. In addition, occasionally the guitarist throws in a bit of a string mute on the last half of the fourth beat of the first measure, where the D5/A is played:

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Not every one of the last five times, but a few of them. You truly don’t have to play them at all, but it’s also a cool little technique that you should get into practicing sooner rather than later. And the whole thing ends on your regular garden variety open position D chord.

I hope you’ve had fun with this lesson. There is a bit to digest here and some of it is going to require some work and patience, not to mention practice! But these are the sort of techniques and little touches that you’re going to run into time and time again in your adventures with the guitar, so having a cheerful little pop song to work them out with isn’t all that bad of a thing, is it?

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Let’s get funky! It’s always fun writing a little ditty for the Guitar Noise readers and conversing over these songs. Here is an intermediate fingerstyle song that incorporates a basic rhythmic bass line and a “click” sound (those are the x’s on the guitar Notation+TAB). Some folks call it “string muting” and some “choking,” but whatever your take on it, this combination of bass and clicking will help you create a quasi-blues feel. Take a listen to the audio on this page and you will know what I’m talking about.

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There are only three chords in this tune. I personally feel that you will be able to figure out the fingering to the chord forms. The click sound is made by tapping your fingers onto the strings (which slap a little against the fretboard). The tap is on beat four. This helps to create a percussive “back beat” for your song.

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The riffs are based off the A minor blues scale and need to be played within the rhythmic framework. In other words – you should keep the tempo and/or feel of the song consistent. I slowed down the last riff to bring the song to an end. You’ve certainly heard this popular technique used in many songs you know.

You can keep the rhythm and substitute your own riffs …this is lots of fun! With all this said, take a listen to the recording, give it a try, and see what happens!

If you would like a video of me playing this song – just e-mail me at petersimms.guitarman@gmail.com

Originally, I had intended this lesson to be part of the “Easy Songs for Beginners” series here at Guitar Noise. Why? Well, if you’ve taken a shot at our two lessons on basic Travis finger style guitar, Let Your Fingers Do the Talking or Add a Pinch, then you should find a song like Dust in the Wind to be relatively easy to work out. In fact, those of you who’ve worked through Add a Pinch probably already have the introduction to this song down cold. And I guess that this is a good time to mention that if you’ve not looked at either of those lessons, you might want to do so. You’ll actually get everything you need to play this song.

And maybe that was the whole problem about using it as a beginners’ lesson. To me it seemed a little redundant. You’ve already learned the picking pattern, so just work out the chord changes and presto! Dust in the wind! Didn’t seem like there’d be much to teach.

I know you get tired of me writing this, but the point of any of the song lessons at Guitar Noise is not to teach you to play that particular song. Well, it is, but not really. What we want to do with our lessons is give you techniques and ideas and arrangements that you can then use with other songs you play. Learning the song is just the very tip of the iceberg, if you’ll pardon the cliché.

So I thought about Dust some more, especially when I got an email from a GN Forum member wondering why, even with the chords and the correct picking pattern, the song still “didn’t sound right.” And I looked at the differences between the original recording and the arrangement I’ve developed over time and I realized that my arrangement simply incorporates a bit more of the melody into the picking pattern. That’s something worth discussion. So here we are.

And because some of what we’re discussing is going to require a bit more thought and practice on your part, I decided to put this lesson in the “Intermediates” section, mostly because of the feedback I’m sure I’m going to get should I risk sticking it into the “Easy Songs for Beginners.” But like most of these “Intermediate” song lessons, it’s more about the work that you’re willing to put into it than about whether or not it’s actually harder. Give it a go and see!

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

Same Old Song (Pattern)

As mentioned, the truth of the matter is that if you have gotten the “pinch pattern” used in Example 2 of the Add a Pinch lesson, then you have this song down cold because, with one or two small exceptions, virtually everything else in the song uses this pinch/picking pattern.

In terms of structure, Dust is very simple. There’s an introduction (that you’ve pretty much already learned to play if you’ve gone through the entire Add a Pinch lesson), a verse and a chorus, a second verse and chorus, a brief instrumental interlude, a final verse and chorus and then a short outro that fades out as the song ends.

As mentioned, we covered about ninety-eight point seven six seven percent of the intro in the Add a Pinch tutorial. The only thing missing is the “pickup,” which is a slight change of pattern at the very end of the introduction that carries us into the first verse. We would tack this change onto the very end of “Example 7″ from the Add a Pinch lesson:

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We’ve run into this particular use of chords in numerous lessons here at Guitar Noise, Blackbird being the first one that springs to mind. And speaking of Blackbird, you’ll notice that I took the liberty of adding a slight variation to this part (“Example 1A”) that uses the A and G notes on the G string to create a fuller pattern and it sounds a bit like Blackbird, no? My thought in adding this is that sometimes it’s hard to switch from the original pattern and give up on the sixteenth notes we’ve been using. So if you can’t keep your fingers from moving, why not just add an extra string to the pattern?

There are a lot of ways to finger the G/B – the important thing to remember is that, at the heart of all of this, you are simply making a slight detour in an Am to C chord change. You’re probably making the Am chord in the “normal” open position manner, that is, your index finger is on the first fret of the B string, your ring finger is on the second fret of the G and your middle finger is on the second fret of the D. Keeping this end goal of getting to a C chord in mind, you might find the best way to play the G/B is to shift your middle finger from the second fret of the D string to the second fret of the A and to use your pinky to get the D note at the third fret of the B string. Some people feel more comfortable shifting all the fingers and play the G/B with the index finger on the A string and the ring finger on the B string, but that seems like a lot of unnecessary movement. Plus, we’ll see that this G/B chord is going to pop up again several times, so it might be beneficial to feel comfortable with a couple of different fingerings.

So let’s try out the whole intro before getting into the verse, shall we?

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The verse consists of four measures that are then repeated, with a slight variation between the fourth measure and the eighth measure:

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Now, while this arrangement is pretty much taken directly from the guitar part of the original recording, I have to admit I don’t like it much for a single guitar performance. We go from having the guitar using the “pinch” technique to shadow the melody in the first line, only to lose it when we switch to the third measure. So, with your permission, I’d like to suggest that we try out a little alteration in the chording that will allow us to track the melody all the way through:

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The one “little alteration” simply means substituting Dm for Dm7. Granted, that’s not the most challenging of tasks, but it does free you up to play along with the melody line for these two measures of the verse. Use your pinky to pull off from the G note (third fret of the high E (sixth) string) to the F note at the first fret. Your pinky can then cover the D note at the third fret of the B string later in the measure. That is, if you’re like me and use your pinky to make a Dm chord. If not, then you should have even less trouble with it.

I deliberately give the melody a bit of a “hiccup” when returning to the Am chord in the next measure in order to make the finger picking easier. That’s a bit of artistic license on my part. Playing the fourth and eighth measures as outlined in Example 3 and Example 3A will certainly work as well.

All We Are…

Having covered the introduction and the verses, let’s turn our attention to the chorus. As with our verse, we can do it straight or go with a more melodic approach. Let’s look at each:

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Essentially, the chorus consists of a repeated two-measure chord progression of D (first two beats of first measure), G (second two beats of the first measure) and Am (second measure). Each cycle through the progression corresponds to one singing of “…dust in the wind…” To make the chord progression more interesting, Kerry Livgren (who wrote the song) used a walking bass line, starting with F# (second fret of the low E (sixth) string) played on the D chord (actually making it D/F#), which goes to G for the G chord, A for the Am chord and then back to G during the last two beats of Am, which technically makes the chord an Am7 or Am/G or even Am7/G depending on your mood when writing it out. I tend to use Am7/G (302010) simply because it’s easier to finger the G note in the bass with the ring finger rather than the pinky. If you’re okay with the stretch then by all means use the full Am/G (302210) fingering.

This pattern is, as mentioned, repeated, with a (yes, you guessed!) slight variation on the last measure, which also includes the “pick up” back into the verse. We could get truly annoying and call it a “turnaround,” but why make more trouble for ourselves at this point?

Adding touches of the melody to the chorus is easy to start with. The initial melody note is D (third fret of the B string), which we’re pinching in the original on the D chord. To keep this note when we change to G, just use a five-string G chord voicing (32003x), especially since you won’t be hitting the high E (first) string with your picking pattern.

I also drop out all of the background in the last beat of the first measure, focusing solely on the two melody notes of C and B (first fret of B string and open B string respectively). This is primarily a matter of making things simpler, but it also brings a moment of relative emptiness to the picking pattern, which has been going non-stop since the introduction. Sometimes a little touch like this can catch your listeners’ attention.

When we get to the Am chord, the melody note is the A at the second fret of the G string. You really want to nail this one good on the first beat as you’ll be covering it over with the same note an instant later in the picking pattern. Hit is hard first and then lightly the second time. And yes, that takes a little practice.

The second time through the progression, we add more D notes (“…all we are is…”) by either using two fingers to pick the B and G strings or by “sweeping” one finger across the two strings in an upward movement. In the MP3 example you can hear me use the latter technique.

Although I do like adding the melody line (or at least parts of it) to both the verse and chorus, I found that I also liked the B to C hammer-on on the B string in the choruses. So I tried to include that in the last measure of the chorus in this arrangement. Over time, it developed into the little flourish that I tabbed out for you in the last example.

This would probably be a good place to mention that the very last solo (after the third verse and just before the outro) is twice as long. In other words, it cycles through the chord changes four times.

Interlude and Outro

Having dealt with the intro, verse and chorus, we now have the interlude and outro to contend with. Except for one slight hiccup, the interlude is still the same basic picking pattern we’ve used all along. The only thing is that we now have some more interesting chord voices to work with:

You definitely want to take a few moments and simple work through the chord changes before working the picking pattern with them. Chances are likely you’ll use your index and ring fingers for most of the work, but I’d like to suggest using your pinky instead of the ring finger for the two F(#11) chords, mostly because it makes the switch from the first on to the second one easier, as you’ll see in a moment.

First, though, I should mention that this chord pattern for the interlude actually starts on the final measure of the second chorus. When you hit the word “wind” the second time around, you start in with the interlude chords, using the picking pattern you’ll see in a moment. The vocals continue (mostly going “oh oh oh”) the first time through the progression and then it plays two additional times while the strings play the instrumental break.

Now let’s look at that little hiccup I mentioned. You’ll find it at the very end of the first measure:

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You see, in Example 6, that there’s a pull off between the seventh and fifth frets of the D string. This actually isn’t that hard to accomplish with a little practice. But here is where a (very) little bit of fretboard knowledge can come in handy. Even if you rely on tablature to do everything for you, you might remember somewhere in the back of your mind that the fifth fret of the D string is G, same as the open G string. That’s one way to tune your guitar. So you can, if you’d like, simply open up the G string as I do in Example 6A to get the very same notes. I also like the sound of the ringing notes of the open strings, so I tend to use this way of playing the interlude on occasion. And, as you’ve hopefully heard in the last MP3 file, both ways sound perfectly fine.

Finally, we get to the outro. As I mentioned earlier, the final chorus is repeated twice and when you get to the very last word (“wind”) you begin the outro pattern that you’ll see in Example 7.

This is the only major deviation from the pinching/picking pattern used throughout the song, so you may want to take this very slowly, piece by piece. Start with using just your thumb on the A and D string to get yourself set and steady in the rhythm and then work on adding the higher strings:

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Again, I can’t stress enough to work through this last part slowly and deliberately. With a little concentrated effort and a little more practice, you should be able to manage this change in pattern. If, however, you find yourself totally at a loss, then use the intro as your outro. Not many people will even notice the difference.

Alright then, here’s the whole package:

I deliberately didn’t include a “playing all the parts” MP3 for this. If you’ve gone through this lesson carefully, you really don’t need it. What’s more important is for you to play it through as best you can. Playing a pattern like this throughout an entire song is not easy, which is why you want to come up with little places of your own to change things up a bit. It also makes things more interesting for your listeners when they get to hear you play it instead of Kansas.

I hope you enjoyed this little outing and find ways to work in melody lines to other songs you already play or are in the process of learning. At the very least, being able to add a bit of melody to your picking can help you provide short leads when you’re performing a solo guitar act and don’t want to sound like you’ve lost your band!

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

One of the (many) recurring themes throughout Guitar Noise, whether you’re working through the various song lessons, reading the Guitar Columns, playing along with the Podcasts or even chatting with folks on the Forum pages, is that we truly want you to know it’s okay to not play a song exactly the way it is on the original recording. Yes, there are all sorts of good reasons to be able to make a musical carbon copy of a song, just as there are numerous compelling reasons not to. My own philosophy is that I’d like to hear someone create music more than I’d like to hear someone copy music. Personal tastes, I’m sure, and you’re more than welcome to your own thoughts on this matter.

But there’s also a matter of what’s important in playing a song. If you’re going to be performing a song in a single-guitar arrangement, that means you have to be comfortable singing and playing. Do you really want to add “playing it exactly like the recording” to that agenda? While it may be vital for some songs (although nowhere near as vital as one might think), for the most part you can more than get by simply playing a song in the general style or “flavor” as the original. More on that in a moment…

One additional short note before we get going, and it’s the same one I gave at the start of the last lesson (Feelin’ Groovy): while we’ve put this lesson in with the “Songs for Intermediates,” it is certainly within the capabilities of a beginner who’s not shy of a bit of practice. If anything, it will hopefully encourage some of you not to be skittish when it comes to just ad-libbing a rhythm part.

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

To assist us in this examination of “how much of the original song do we really need” is the classic Who song, Behind Blue Eyes. And we have to deal with this question right from the very first note, so before we get into the structure and chords and everything else, let’s use the introduction as a way to all get on the same page.

Think about this: the first two measures of Behind Blue Eyes are an Esus4 (022200) arpeggio in sixteenth notes. That’s thirty-two sixteenth notes strung together. Even if we all agree on nailing the first note, the E of the open low E (sixth) string, that gives us thirty-one chances to screw up the beginning of the song!

More important – Do you think that Pete Townsend sat down and deliberately wrote out exactly what note should be played first, second, third, etc.,? Not very likely! He probably turned on the recorder and then “got up his guitar and played.” The second take he played he may have kept certain notes here and there but, in all probability, didn’t get it exactly the same. He might have – artists all have their own individual footprints, little stylistic touches that come from their own personal experiences in playing.

If you think of the sheer number of variations possible, just playing two measures of sixteenth notes, it’s kind of mind boggling. And that’s not even taking into account that you don’t have to play nothing but sixteenth notes. Notice in the following “Example 1B” the cool effect by tying together one pair of sixteenth notes into an eighth note. That gives the music a little breathing space and makes it sound even more natural.

So here, just to give you a concrete, audible idea of what we’ve been talking about, are three examples: first, the “note for note” recording, and then two variations that were simply put together in the same basic style, or “flavor” of the original:

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Now you can argue until doomsday as to which sounds “best,” but the bottom line is that anyone listening to you play any of these will immediately say, “Hey! That’s Behind Blue Eyes, isn’t it? I love that song!” And that’s all you’re looking for, unless your day job is being the guitarist in a Who tribute band (and wouldn’t “Who Are We?” be a great name for such a band?).

To repeat a point I can’t stress enough – if you’re playing a song and your brain is on overload because it’s trying to make sure every note is correct, you’re going to be way too tense to play.

But what if I just showed you an Esus4 chord and asked you to play an arpeggio for two measures? You’d have absolutely no trouble with that. You probably could sit right down and start playing and we’d be off on making music out of this song. And that’s what we want – to play a song. Any song is simply a bunch of chords and, for the most part, you can play those chords in all sorts of ways and styles.

Speaking of songs being a bunch of chords, let’s take a look at the structure of today’s song in question. Behind Blue Eyes begins with the two-measure introduction that we’ve just seen and listened to.

After that, we’ve got two verses. Each verse can be divided into an “A” section (the “no one knows what it’s like…” part), and a “B” section (which begins with the line “….but my dreams they aren’t as empty…”). The “A” section consists of four measures and the chords move from Em to G (first measure) to D (second measure) to Cadd9 (third measure) to Asus4 (fourth measure). Since we’ve a long time on the D, embellishing that chord by switching to a Dsus4 and back during the second half of the second measure is a nice touch. Using Cadd9 (x32030) sounds very cool and is a good example of the use of sustained notes that we’ve discussed in other song lessons, as well as in a Guitar Column all on its own. So here is a template of arpeggios to use as a starting point:

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What I didn’t do for this particular example is give you a number of variations already written out for you to try. Why? Well, that should seem fairly obvious at this point – there are so many different ones you can come up with yourself that you don’t really need my help with it. Trust your instincts and try out some on your own. The only guideline you need is to remember that the Em changes to G at the third beat of the second measure.

Now you may ask, “What about the D and Dsus4 change in the second measure of this section?” And my answer would be that you can fiddle around with that change. It’s all based on the D chord and slight variations will not hurt anything, even if you’re singing and playing at the same time because you’re not singing on the last two beats of this measure. Cool how that works out, isn’t it?

A few things that are important to note here – first, in all likelihood, this isn’t just going to happen on the first try. It might! But even if it does, chances are that you won’t think it sounds good because “it’s not the same as on the record.” Or you may not think it sounds good just because it’s you that’s playing it! We are, as a rule, not our own best judges. But remember that this is just background. It’s just chord arpeggios that happen while the lyrics are being sung. And whether we want to admit it or not, the lyrics are the important part of the song here. The guitar part is just part of the delivery service.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be stunning and stellar. It just means that we should play our part with the lyric in mind, keeping our playing, if you’ll pardon the pun, in harmony with the spirit of the song. Hopefully when you listen to the final MP3 in this lesson, you’ll have an understanding for this.

The other important thing to mention is that, in spite of yourself, you will find yourself changing what you do as you improve as a guitarist. You’ll have better command of your crosspicking, of your hammer-on and pull-off techniques. And, as silly as it may sound, this is another compelling reason to not be hung up on playing things exactly like a recording. The guitarist you’re intent on copying (hopefully) did not stop learning and growing as a musician after recording a song and undoubtedly began to incorporate new techniques and ideas into the old songs he or she played. That’s a natural part of evolving as an artist. Why wouldn’t you want to do the same?

The ability to create your own part becomes more interesting in the “B” section of the verse. Usually a person might be tempted to strictly strum this part, but why not add some picking and fills, too?

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Yes, again I didn’t write out anything but a basic template for you here. And again, that’s the point. Even a relative beginner is capable of putting together a rhythm that will work for this. Let the music talk to your senses and then channel it out through your guitar.

If you’re someone who’s been following along with the series of Guitar Noise Podcasts, I suspect you’re having a lot of fun with this. If you’re someone who’s always needed to have each and every note of music tabbed out, then this is your chance to branch out and see that you can create music, too. Have fun with it.

After the first two verses, we then reach a brief instrumental interlude, followed by the “Bridge” section (“…when my fist clenches crack it open…”). The basic rhythm pattern for both these parts is essentially the same and here it is:

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I want to note that while many Internet (and book) transcriptions and arrangements will use an E5 (or E power chord) here, I think that the E major chord is a better choice. First off, and this is especially true if you’re a beginner, you might have an easier time with this section playing all open position chords. You can easily avoid the full Bm barre chord by playing it with any of these options:

The last example (“Bm with E”) makes use of the open high E (first) string as a drone, something that Pete Townsend did on a regular basis. And since it’s the same shape as our standard open position E major chord, it’s relatively easy to move it from one place on the neck to the other.

It’s this ease, in fact, that helped me come up with a way to “borrow” the electric guitar lead line from the original recording and put it into our single guitar arrangement. On the original, the electric lead guitar is bending the F# note at the eleventh fret of the G string up to a G# (same sound as the thirteenth fret) while using the E and B notes at the twelfth frets of the first two strings as drones. It’s this sounding of the G# by the electric guitar, by the way, that gives us the true go-ahead to play an E major chord. After all, it’s the G# that makes it a E major and not just an E5.

With a little ingenuity, we can recreate the flavor of the electric guitar part, only an octave lower than the original, with our arrangement:

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Here we’re going to start by hitting the open low E (sixth) string on the first half of the first beat and let it ring throughout. This gives us a good “oomph” to the bass and helps cover up the fact that we’re not playing a full chord until the end of the measure!

While hitting this open note, get your fingers in position. Put your middle finger on the G note (fifth fret of the D string) and your index finger on the fourth fret of the G string, which is the same note as the open B string. This is insurance. Even though it’s not in the notation, when I hit the first two open strings later in the measure, I will also catch this note at the fourth fret of the G string, so that the B note is doubled. The chance of hitting the open G by accident is pretty good and that’s the note I least want to hear!

After I hit the G note at the fifth fret of the D string, I bend it up a half-step to G#, giving me, along with the ringing low E string, two thirds of an E chord. Then I make a short upstroke on the first two strings (both open) to flesh out the rest of the E chord. This all takes a little practice, but it’s pretty easy (especially since we’re only worried about a half-bend instead of the full bend of the original electric guitar part) and definitely fills things out for a single guitar arrangement.

The rest of the interlude uses a combination of chords and arpeggios. You’ll notice that using the “Bm with E” makes for very easy fingering. I also like the sound of the Asus2 here, but you can certainly go with a regular A for the third chord if you prefer.

This “Instrumental Interlude” is played three times – once at the start of the Bridge, once in the middle and then again at the end. In the final MP3 of this lesson, you’ll hear me use this “borrowed electric guitar part” for the first and third Interludes while using the “Basic Strum,” from Example 4, for the middle one.

The final Instrumental Interlude ends with what might be considered a “turnaround,” a short group of chords designed to get us ready for the Outro, which is a repeat of the very first line of the song (one pass through the “Section A” part of the Verse).

This “turnaround” is a typical Pete Townsend chording approach, and I’ve taken the liberty of adding another of his “footprints” to it:

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You can hear that while the initial B chord is ringing, I’m adding a drone of the B note in the bass (second fret of the A string). This is for two reasons – first (and most obvious), to keep time and to also keep the song driven. Totally dropping out seems way too abrupt and since I don’t have a bass or drummer to maintain the momentum it only makes sense to do it myself. Second, I think it sounds cool.

I should note that instead of playing the last eighth note of B in the second measure, using a sixteenth note triplet for that half beat will sound very cool, too.

After hitting the final B chord, we open up the A string in order to get “B/A” and lower the song’s dynamic by switching to an arpeggio of this chord. That leads us to playing our arpeggios throughout the Outro, until using a final Asus2 chord to close the song.

Okay, then, let’s put things together and see how it goes:

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As always, I hope that you’ve had fun with this lesson and that you take to heart the idea that it’s more than okay to come up with a great arrangement on your own instead of relying on the “note for note” tablature. For a song like this one, the chances are very good that what you come up with will work just as well as the original. The object is to play to your personal strengths and to have your arrangement grow and develop just as you are going to do as a guitarist.

So try things out and see how you do!

And, as always, until our next lesson…

Peace

Taking a person outside of the comfort zone is an excellent way to grow in skills. That’s a basic principle in teaching that often is overlooked. We tend to focus on the practice-until-proficient part. But at the same time one is becoming proficient at one skill, new skills are introduced to continue progress. Otherwise, one hits that dreaded plateau. One of the main functions of a teacher is to keep moving the student past the point of comfort by presenting new challenges.

The whole concept of chord melody as a playing style has been around for ages. And, like most aspects of both music in general and the guitar in specific, there is no end to the variations you can come up with playing in this particular manner. You can have full chords, such as in our recent lesson on Christmas carol Joy to the World, you can use one extra note to accompany your melody, as in O Tannenbaum, or almost anything in between.

The variations multiply even more when you factor in the use of alternate tunings, even one as common place as Drop D. And that’s where we’ll be spending this particular lesson, on a Drop D arrangement of the perennial New Year’s Eve standard, Auld Lang Syne.

GN Moderator and Contributor Graham Merry has already written a wonderful piece on this song, not to mention on the whole concept of chord melody in general, in his lesson entitled, Birth of a Chord Melody – you might want to give that one a read before we proceed. In the meantime, I’ll deal with the pesky “disclaimer” part:

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

Of course, the first thing we’ll want to do is to get our guitars in Drop D tuning. As you undoubtedly know from reading an old (but timeless!) Guitar Column called On the Tuning Awry, or from any number of song lessons such as the classic Neil Young tune, Harvest Moon, all we have to do is to tune our low E (sixth) string down a full step to D. While you’re doing that, I’ll put together the melody and chords of our lesson for you:

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Since Graham’s lesson on Auld Lang Syne is heavy on the “chord” aspect of chord melody, it seems that going with a sparser, more open arrangement that relies on bass lines and chord arpeggios (at least to start with!) would be an interesting take. Plus, as you’ll see and hear later, it opens the door to some interesting chord substitutions. So let’s get going with the first two lines of our song:

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Even though we start out with a simple D chord to hold both melody and accompaniment easily, I’d like to suggest using your index finger to barre the first three strings at the second fret as this will make playing the C# note (second fret of the B string) a lot smoother for you. The E minor chord is fingered 222000 in Drop D tuning and shouldn’t give you any trouble, but if you prefer, Em7 (220000) makes a perfectly good substitute.

My main reason for using A7 instead of A is to allow me to play harmony notes on the G string for the last beat of the second measure. You can, if you like, use a double hammer-on to get the F# (second fret of the high E (first) string) and A (second fret of the G). That will sound very nice, and I’m sure you’ll agree if you try it.

The Bm that starts the third measure is more implied than played in full, as we’re only picking out the B (second fret of the A) and D (third fret of the B) notes. You could flesh this out by playing the strings in between, either as Bm (X2443X) or even as G/B (X2003X). Each has a different character, so try them both out before deciding.

I made a substitution of D7, technically a D7/F# since I’m playing the F# note on the fourth fret of the low D (sixth) string, instead of a regular D for the last chord in Measure Three for two reasons. First, I like the way it sounds. It makes the transition from D to G more interesting and intense, especially when using the F# as the bass note. And it’s an easy shape to make when adding said F# in the bass. As a further plus, it puts me in great position, finger-wise, to make the G chord with the high B note (seventh fret of the high E (first) string) in the melody.

And position can be very important when working out a chord melody arrangement. In fact, being where I am on the finger board at the end of the second line of the verse puts me in great shape for the start of the third line:

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It even allows me a chance to make a very interesting chord substitution by simply sliding my G note up a half-step to G# (sixth fret of the low D (sixth) string), which plays very nicely when I use D/A instead of just plain old D at the start of the next measure. The G to G# to A in the bass is definitely more interesting than just using root notes, and the G# diminished chord that we create in the process is one of those magical touches that make the song more alive, and only we have to know that it’s an incredibly easy chord change to pull off!

It gets better. Being up in the middle of the neck allow us to play the voicing of the D chord we’ve used in other song lessons (even Christmas song lessons, such as Silent Night) before moving back down to our “regular” open position D chord.

The bass line gets center stage again for a while, making an E to F# to G run en route to the open A string. But why stop there? Using A# (first fret of the A string) gives us an implied A# diminished chord, that carries us to the Bm at the start of the next measure much the same way the G# diminished chord did two measures earlier. You’re getting a lot of bang for your buck just by using chromatic half-steps between chords.

And you can also create more tension-and-release moments, just by lifting off a finger here and there, as at the end of the verse. Sounding the open G string, right after playing two notes of the D chord, creates Dsus4, which then gets resolved by playing the F# note at the fourth fret of the D string. You could also just go back to the A (second fret of the G string) if you’d like, although that will sound a little more ambiguous.

Since we’ve gone relatively sparse during the verses, focusing on full, vibrant chords during the chorus will make a nice contrast. We can even use some interesting extensions to jazz things up a bit:

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Even though the original melody-and-chord chart didn’t call for it, starting out the chorus with a resounding A chord makes a lot of sense, both to the head and, more importantly, to the ears. But remember that the melody note is B (seventh fret of the high E (first) string), so the melody is actually giving you the ninth. So we oblige by playing an A9 (X05657), which is best accomplished by using the index finger to barre across the first four strings at the fifth fret.

Once again, being around the fifth fret makes playing that voicing of D, now making use of all six strings (000775) a breeze.

I like what we did with the A9 so much that not only do I use it again at the end of the second measure, it inspires the use of a D9 (technically D9/F# – 400555) for the final chord of the third measure. Here I’d recommend using your pinky or the ring finger for the barre of the first three strings at the fifth fret.

We’ve created a grandiose feeling with the chorus so far, so seems reasonable to continue on through the rest of the chorus in the same manner:

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Using the A# note (first fret of the A string) against the rest of the A7 chord above, with the F# note in the melody, sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? So much so, in fact, that I can’t help but default to the “two note Bm” that starts the next measure, simply for contrast. Again, you should feel free to use a fuller chord at this point if you so desire.

And it also seems appropriate to make a slightly fancier closing statement to end the chorus. Not all that fancier, mind you, just opening up the G string again but then going for the A note at the second fret before finishing with the F# at the fourth fret of the D string. You can certainly use a hammer-on to get that penultimate A note. It will sound very cool.

So let’s put everything together and wrap up our 2008 series of holiday lessons:

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This arrangement, while not terribly difficult, will give you some challenges that should require a bit of practice (note how stiff I sound!). But the important lesson is to try out chords and ideas that you may not have had on your radar until now. Work out each line in terms of positioning and listen to how the individual notes of the chords play against and then into each other. Hopefully you’ll be mesmerized enough to try out some chord melody arrangements of your own. Doesn’t have to be this particular song – almost any song can be performed in this manner.

And I hope that you enjoyed not only this lesson, and not only our group of holiday song arrangements, but all the various lessons here at Guitar Noise this past year. It’s been fun writing them and I hope that you’ll enjoy the many lessons coming up right around the turn of the calendar page.

As always, please feel free to email me (dhodgeguitar@aol.com) with any questions you might have. You can also reach me at the Guitar Noise Forum pages, either on a thread or by dropping me a PM.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

And I had to laugh. I’m sure that some of you have read one of my old Guitar Columns called Christmas in June, or if you’ve ever heard me teach a beginners’ class on the importance of timing, you know that it takes the simplest changes to turn any descending major scale into the first line of a very, very popular Christmas carol:

Well, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, I thought why not come up with an arrangement for Joy to the World in this tuning? After all, it would certainly give me something new to work out and it never hurts to explore a familiar tune in a new setting.

Anyway, before we get into this lesson, I do want to say that this arrangement may not be for everyone. I can’t tell you how many different ways I know to play this particular song – how many different tunings and how many different keys. I think it’s one of the reasons it’s so popular.

But I do hope you like this take on an old favorite. One advantage to it is that you can play this arrangement with a pick, and I know that appeals to quite a few of our readers here at Guitar Noise. Using just your fingers is perfectly okay, too.

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

Okay, first things first! In case you don’t know about Double Drop D tuning which, by the way, you can read about in our Guitar Column called On the Tuning Awry or in the Songs for Intermediates lesson on Cinnamon Girl, we should take a moment to get you and your guitar in tune.

Assuming you’re in standard tuning to begin with, all you have to do is to tune both of your E strings – the high (first) and low (sixth) ones – down a full step from E to D. You can obviously do this with a tuner or simply match the two new D strings to the regular D (fourth) string by comparing octaves. Whichever, you will now be tuned, from lowest to highest strings, to the following notes: DADGBD.

And now that you’re set, here’s the melody and accompanying chords, written out, as all our examples for this lesson are, in Double Drop D tuning:

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That’s fairly easy, isn’t it? One thing to remember is that you can play your D notes in the melody with either your new high D (first) string or at the third fret of the B string as you do in standard tuning, whichever way seems most comfortable.

Before we add some accompanying chords to our melody, let’s remember that our basic chords are going to be different now because of our tuning. For instance, here are two ways of making a G major chord:

There are, of course, all sorts of ways to finger these chords. For starters, you might want to use your index finger on the sixth (low D) string, your middle finger on the A string and then your pinky or ring finger on the first (high D) string. Some of you might like not playing the A string at all, instead flattening your index finger slightly, which will mute the A string when you make a full strum. It’s a great way to practice that particular technique. You could, instead, use your middle and ring fingers on the sixth and fifth strings, respectively, which would mean using the pinky on the first string.

The full D chord also needs a little change of configuration:

And we’ll talk about the fingering for this one after we’ve taken a look at the first four measures of Joy to the World, written out in chord melody fashion:

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In this case, it makes sense to start out by fingering what you currently think of as a “normal” D chord (middle finger on the second fret of the first string, ring finger on the third fret of the second and index finger on the second fret of the third) and then add your pinky to the fourth fret of the first string. Doing so puts you exactly in place to play the second and third notes of the melody with the chords attached. It definitely makes things easy in the first two measures.

The third and fourth measures will require a little accuracy in your strumming (as noted earlier, you can use either a pick or your fingers in this arrangement) and some of you might prefer to not even play the F# note (fourth fret of the regular D (fourth) string) in the second chord of the third measure. That’s okay; the open D (fourth) string will sound perfectly fine as a substitute. One of the things you may be noticing is that we’re kind of going whole hog with the chord melody approach so far. Joy to the World has a kind of a majestic sound, almost like a processional you might hear at a royal event, and using full chords that employ the entire range of the guitar help bring this out.

We continue with this approach in Measures Five through Eight, but I also offer a bit of a break to mix things up when we reach the long, drawn out G in Measure Seven:

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Now, some of you may be asking, “Where did the Am7 come from? That wasn’t with the original chords!” And, you’d be right to do so. Normally, the C chord would be played there, but since Am is the relative minor of C and Am7 contains all the notes of the C chord (Am7 is A, C, E and G and C is, of course, C, E and G), it made sense to make this substitution for the sake of easier playing. If playing Am7 doesn’t work for your ears, then just don’t play the A string. You’ll have all the notes of your C chord and the only difference is that you have an E as your bass note instead of C. And that works out fine with D coming as the next chord.

Some of you may also not like all the space spent waiting between the G chord that starts Measure Seven (the word “king” when being sung) and the G note at the end of Measure Eight which, pardon the pun, heralds the start of the next line. Making use of a short arpeggio, such as the one shown in Example 3A, will certainly fit the bill. It’s totally your call.

Measures Nine and Ten (“…let every heart…” get repeated as Measures Eleven and Twelve (“…prepare Him room…”). The melody could be played totally over a G chord, but I like tossing in the C (or Am7 if you’ve come to like that chord) right before the end of each phrase:

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Now comes the fun part, the “heaven and nature sing!” line that gets repeated until the end. This is a great place to work with the dynamics of the song and switching from full chords (or as full as possible) to double stops seems to work well for the first two times through the phrase:

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Again, if you have problems with reaching both the F# (fourth fret of the regular D (fourth) string) and the A (second fret of the G), as shown in Example 5A, you can go with the open D (fourth string) note instead of the F#. But I do recommend you giving it a try. This is a stretch that you’re going to run into in a lot of songs, whether you play chords or lead lines, and it will be good practice for you. Notice the use of single bass notes to fill in the spaces.

We get back into the full chord accompaniment for the finale of our Christmas carol:

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Since you’ve been playing all these chords for a while now, you’re probably getting good at striking just the strings you need to in order to make the melody ring out.

Okay, let’s put the whole thing together! And please forgive my falling apart right at the very end on the MP3 file!

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I hope that you enjoyed this lesson and that you forgive our getting it online after the Christmas holiday! But it is pretty easy to learn, so you should still get the chance to play this lovely carol during the rest of the holiday season. There are twelve days of Christmas, no? If not, then start in on it whenever Christmas season officially starts in your neck of the woods. Some of our readers swear that’s September 1 and that seems almost around the corner!

As always, please feel free to email me (dhodgeguitar@aol.com) with any questions you might have. You can also reach me at the Guitar Noise Forum pages, either on a thread or by dropping me a PM.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Getting these two thoughts into your head is essential if you want to be able to solo over any song. If the point hasn’t been driven home yet then, again hopefully, this latest installment will help you drive the point home.

On the surface, this should seem easy enough. We’re going to use a simple progression of two chords and figure out what will be the best way to solo over it. I should rephrase that, as not all of us are ever going to agree as to what is the “best way” to solo. How about we say instead that we’re going to look at various options, each valid in their own way? Ready?

Okay, our chord progression will be in four-four timing and will consist of one measure (four beats) of Dm and then one measure of G. That’s G major. If you’d like to hear it, skip down to the last MP3 file of this lesson. Be sure to right click it and save it to your computer so that you can play along with it later.

Again, it sounds pretty simple, right? But before we jump right in, let’s take a moment or two and think about what we’re going to do in terms of soloing.

First, we might want to think about what key this progression is in. D minor certainly seems like a good bet as things seems to focus around that D minor chord. But if we look carefully, we should see a flaw in that logic. Have you found it?

Maybe it would be good to back up a step and look at the chords themselves. Dm is made up of the notes D, F and A, while G is made from the notes G, B and D. We should all be agreed on that, right? Let’s take a look at all the notes:

D F G A B

Given this much information, we could just construct a scale from these notes. Because it has five notes, it’s certainly a pentatonic scale, but it doesn’t match any of the two pentatonic scales that we already know. The major pentatonic is the root, second, third, fifth and sixth. So if D is our root, the D major pentatonic is D, E, F#, A and B. The minor pentatonic is made up of the root, minor third, fourth, fifth and flat seventh, and if we again use D as our root, that would mean the D minor pentatonic is D, F, G, A and Bb. Neither of these is a match for what’s going on here.

As much as I hate to say it, this is where even the slightest bit of knowledge of music theory might be a big help. You would know, for instance, that the notes taken from our two chords would have to come from the key of C. Why? The first tip off is that there are no flats or sharps. You might argue that there could be a C# or an Eb, but I would point out to you that both the F and B are natural. The key of C has no flats or sharps. When we move to the key of G, which has one sharp, that sharp is F#. It has to be. There is no key signature that has only a C#. If we go in the other direction, the key that only has one flat is F and that note is Bb.

Another argument I might use is that the key of C is the only key where we’d be able to construct both the Dm and G chords out of the major scale, as you may have read in The Power of Three or in other theory articles we have here at Guitar Noise.

It’s situations like this where we have to make a great leap forward in our thinking. We have to learn that, sometimes, there is a difference between a key or key signature and a tonal center. People often use these two concepts interchangeably, but there will be occasions where you need to separate the two ideas.

So even though we have a progression where the two chords are taken from the key of C, the tonal center we are shooting for is D minor. What does this mean to us? Well, as mentioned earlier, we could create a new pentatonic scale, just for this occasion. Seems like a lot of time and effort though, especially since we’ve already learned our pentatonic scales so well.

How about this? Let’s try using the A minor pentatonic scale, since Am is the relative minor of the key of C. The notes of this scale, which are A, C, D, E and G, will certainly fit the bill because they are all in the key of C. I’m going to do a short solo using the “Root Six” position of the A minor pentatonic:

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How about trying the D minor pentatonic scale, which I’ll write out for you as well in “Root Six” position:

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That certainly sounds a little more like it. But I can’t help thinking that I still might have a better option.

And I do – the C major scale. It has all the notes of both chords of the progression, especially the B note (noticeably absent in both our previous pentatonic scales), which totally makes that G major chord sing out.

The trick, if you want to think of it, is that while we are using the C major scale, we’re actually going to target notes in both these chords, the Dm and G. If it helps (and it certainly helps many people), don’t think of this as the C major scale, but rather as the D Dorian scale. I’ve taken the liberty of writing this out as such:

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Now, folks will endlessly argue about whether or not this scale is the C Major or the D Dorian, and you’re certainly welcome to add your two cents. For right now, though, I just want you to take the time to experiment with all three, to compare and contrast sounds, to listen to what aspects of each you like. Or don’t like.

In order to help you do so, here is an “extended” version of our chord progression, just for you to play over:

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One thing you should definitely take away from this lesson, though, is the idea that you can fall back on the Dorian mode whenever you run into this particular type of chord progression, going from a minor root (or tonal center) to the major fourth. Sure, you can certainly fall back on the tried and true minor pentatonic, but your ears may appreciate you adding the extra two notes you get from taking the full scale. Your audience might, too

While you’ve gotten quite a bit of information this time out, I also want to leave you thinking about this puzzle over what to call our last scale. You might want to take a moment or two and read up on modes here at Guitar Noise. The article A La Modal might be a good place to start.

And next time out, we’ll pick right up with this question, because I think that I may have an answer that will work for many of you. Also, we’ll get to see firsthand the trap that we’ve led ourselves into by our very practicing of scales. Interested?

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next time…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Choosing Colors – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 1
• One Note At A Time – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 2
• The Major and the Minor – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 3
• Combining The Major Scale With The Minor Pentatonic – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 4
• Color Me Blue – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
• Sustaining Interest in a Target – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 7
• Taking Care of Choices – Turning Scales into Solos – Part 8

No, I’m not trying to pull you leg here. Way too often, and for some reason it seem especially more true nowadays than when I was learning guitar way back in the primordial ooze, people learn a song without realizing that the techniques they’ve picked up in learning this one piece can easily be applied to many, many other tunes. Good musicians are constantly expanding on what they’ve learned, using those skills as the groundwork on which to build new ones.

Since we’ve covered a lot of ground in both bass lines and Travis-style finger picking in the past two years here at Guitar Noise, it makes a lot of sense to try to incorporate these ideas and techniques in our exploration of chord melody arrangements of holiday songs, no? So let’s get to it!

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

Today we’ll work up an arrangement of Angels We Have Heard on High, a traditional French carol. And since we’re basically concerned about playing a chord melody version, how about we start out with the melody and chords?

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The verse of our carol is laid out in the first two lines, which are repeated. To make matters very simple, all of our melody notes are either on the open high E (first) string, or on the first or third fret of the high E (first) and B strings.

As far as the chords go, it also helps to see that we only use C or G for this section, even though we’ll be changing that in just a moment! Why? Well, the purpose of this lesson is to work on bass lines, and what better place to start? Let’s take the first two measures of the melody and add a very simple moving bass line:

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Since we’re going from a C chord in the first measure to a G chord in the second, we can use the standard descending bass line, going from our first root, C, to G. Well, we could except that if we use one note per beat, we’d end up on G at the end of the first measure. That certainly doesn’t sound bad, but instead we’re going to stop at A (the open A string) on the third beat and hold that note over the fourth beat. Part of the reason this will work is because Am is the relative minor of C major. The two chords are very similar: C being made of the notes C, E and G while Am is made of the notes A, C and E. Since there will be a G note in the melody on the fourth beat, we’re technically creating an Am7 chord (notes are A, C, E and G), which contains all the notes of the C chord we started with.

And speaking of chords, it’s time to fill the spaces between our melody and our bass line with those chords. Keeping with the spirit of giving, I’m going to offer you some choices:

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First thing I’d like to mention is that no matter how you usually finger your G chord, you’ll probably have a lot easier time of the second measure if you go with your ring finger on the low E (sixth) string, your middle finger on the A string and your pinky on the high E (first) string. This frees up your index finger to get the F note in the melody (first fret of the first string) while still hanging on to the G chord in the accompaniment. This fingering will help you with all three versions of Example 3.

That being said, Example 3A is almost standard chord melody, with the melody note lying atop the accompanying chord. The notation and tablature are arranged for finger style guitar. The optimal technique would be to play the bass notes (the ones with the down-turned stems) with your thumb and either plucking the melody and accompanying partial chords with your fingers or playing them by sweeping a finger or two in an upward movement. At this point in the arrangement, you could also certainly play full chords here, as opposed to the partial chords I’ve written out. Just be very careful of letting the melody note ring out when you strum.

But I earlier mentioned that I’d like to also do a bit of review of Travis finger picking. So Example 3B gives us an arrangement of this carol in this style. Essentially it’s all pinches of the melody and bass notes on the beat, with a strike of the open G string on the off-beat. Again, I can’t stress enough that using the fingering we discussed just a moment ago for the G chord will help you to make the stretch to the first fret of the high E (first) string when the melody calls for it.

Of course, some of you might ask, “Why can’t I do both chords and picking?” No reason that I can think of! That’s why there’s an Example 3C. In the final MP3 example of this lesson, you may even hear me reverse the two, playing some Travis style picking in the first measure and chunks of chord melody in the second. What’s life without a little variety, eh?

Since this workman’s approach has served up well for the first two measures (and remember that these two measures will be both the first and the third lines of the verse), it makes sense to do the same for the next two measures, which will be played for both the second and fourth lines of the verse:

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You might notice something interesting here. In Example 4A, I went with the same descending bass line I used in Example 2, going from C to B to A in the first measure. But somewhere in playing around with filling in the chords, I decided why not change back to the original C chord, if for no other reason than to be different the second time through the changes of the verse? So you’ll see that the bass note on the third beat of the first measure in Examples 4B, 4C and 4D is C (third fret of the A string) and not the open A string. This is purely a choice of my own. You can still use the note of the open A string if you like.

Also, the fingering we discussed twice already for the G chord that starts the second measure becomes moot here, since the first melody note of this measure is the open high E (first) string.

Okay, we’ve gotten through the verse. Now comes the fun part – all those Glor-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-orias! It is going to be a bit of a challenge, but I think you’re up to it. Here in the chorus, we’re going to go for some separation and interplay between the melody and bass lines, much as what happens when this carol is sung by a choir. It basically boils down to one part moving while the other stays still:

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I deliberately left out the chords in Example 5, but you may actually find it easier to play this part by keeping the chords intact and then strumming them as they occur in Example 5A.

Remember that we’re going to be starting out the chorus on a C chord, so start out by fingering a typical open position C chord (ring finger on the third fret of the A string, middle finger on the second fret of the D and index finger on the first fret of the B string) and add your pinky to the third fret of the high E (first) string in order to play the G note of the melody.

The bass line of C to D back to C and then to B won’t be all that difficult if you maintain the C chord, or at least the idea of it, in your head. The tricky part comes when we want to change to an A chord at the third beat. It’s even trickier because the melody note is the A located at the fifth fret of the high E (first) string. But fortunately you can deal with this by playing what I call a “classical style” A chord, which involves barring the first four strings at the second fret when playing the aforementioned A note with your pinky. This will allow you to get the G note (third fret of high E (first) string) with either your ring or middle finger, whichever feels more comfortable to you.

We could leave it at that, but going from the bass note of the open A string to C# (fourth fret of the A string) sounds too nice to pass up. But we luck out again as the melody note is F and we can easily find that note at the sixth fret of the B string. So, using our index finger on the A string and either the ring finger or pinky on the B string makes this work out very easily. The E note that finishes this measure can then be played either at the fifth fret of the B string (using either your middle or ring finger) or by simply plucking the open high E (first) string.

The second measure begins with a D minor chord, which will eventually take us to a G chord. I liked the shape of the first bass phrase, so it certainly bears repeating. This will actually give us a G/B at the third beat. “G/B,” as you probably recognize as a “slash chord” from many of our lessons here at Guitar Noise (such as Eleanor Rigby), is just a fancy way of saying play a G chord with the B note (second fret of the A string) in the bass instead of the regular G, which we use at the fourth beat of the measure anyway.

In the third measure we start out with our C chord again, but this time we run the bass notes straight down from C to F (first fret of the low E (sixth) string). You could do a full barre chord of F here, but it sounds perfectly fine if you just get the F notes on both E strings at once. There are all sorts of ways to finger this. But I’d like to recommend you try using your middle finger on the low E (sixth) string as you can then slide it up to the second fret at the fourth beat (using your ring finger and index fingers, respectively for the D and C notes on the B string) and also use it for the G note at the third fret that begins the fourth measure.

I cannot stress enough that these past four measures are tricky and will require patience on your part. Work slowly and always keep the chord shapes in your head and fingers. Those shapes will help you get your fingers where you want them to be (and when, too).

A little concentrated effort and persistence on your part is all that is required. Don’t be afraid to just work on these four measures all by themselves for an hour! You’ll be rewarded for your efforts!

Compared to what you’ve just done, the rest of Angels is going to be a piece of cake, so it’s going to be up to us to make it more or less interesting. I took the liberty of giving you four options of bass lines for the next two measures. Oh, and ignore the fact that I call “Example 6″ by the name of “Example 7″ in the MP3, will you?

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Of these four, I’m probably most taken with the fourth version, especially since it uses the low F again and does a little teensy bit of Travis finger style in the last measure. Let’s fill these out to demonstrate both the middle of the chorus (measures five and six) and the final two measures as well:

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All right, then! Here’s the whole enchilada! And, as always, please pardon the (many) mistakes!

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As I mentioned, this piece is going to pose some challenges. But it is not beyond your capabilities. Far from it! Remember that the chord shapes are your friends in that they will give your fingers an anchor as well as direction. Practice, persistence and patience are your allies.

I hope that you enjoyed this lesson and that you get the chance to play this lovely carol over the holiday season. As always, please feel free to email me (dhodgeguitar@aol.com) with any questions you might have. You can also reach me at the Guitar Noise Forum pages, either on a thread or by dropping me a PM.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

I’ve really missed writing for Guitar Noise, so I’ve put together a few lessons for Christmas. This first lesson is a simple DADGAD arrangement of a very well-known, traditional French Christmas Carol titled “Il Est Né,” which translates to “He Is Born” in English. David tells me this is one of his favorites.

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A few quick performance notes: You’ll notice that throughout the arrangement I’ve used a few Celtic-style ornaments, particularly the quick pull off (also known as a “cut”) on the top open D (first) string.

This is a beautiful tune and it begs to be played slowly, so I’ve suggest a BPM of a quarter note at 118, but you may want to set your metronome to 59 or 60 for the tempo on the half note.

Note the double stops in the B Section; the slow, easy tempo will make this section easier to play.

Once again, I hope you’ve enjoyed playing this tune as much as I have. I hope to get at least one more lesson out before Christmas, so stay tuned!

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

Fool that I am, I’ll assume that we’re all on the same page when we’re talking about chord melody arrangements. If you’re kind of not sure about that, just pop over to the lessons on the Song Arrangements page or any of our other Christmas song lessons.

For this lesson, I want to try to keep things as relatively simple as possible. You should be able to play our arrangement of Silver Bells with either a pick or your fingers. In fact, I’m using a pick in all of the MP3 examples. Let’s see, other things you might want to know – the song is in 3 / 4 timing, and we’ll be playing this in the key of G and will pretty much be using versions of simple G, Am, C and D chords you already know. We’ll also toss in a few interesting voicings to help us out in playing the melody.

Like many songs, the chords and melody of Silver Bells involves a number of repeated patterns and phrases. That makes it a little easier to learn. Let’s begin with the very first line, actually just the first part of it:

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If you’ve never tried a chord melody before, this is as close to as easy as it gets. Silver Bells begins with two eighth notes played on beat three. This, as we’ve learned in other lessons, is called a “pickup.” So, for instance, if we were counting aloud for our bandmates, we’d call out “one, two, three, one, two” and start in on “City sidewalks…”

Here in the first half of the first line, we strum an open G chord and then remove whatever finger you usually use on the third fret of the high E (first) string and strike that now open string. We’ll then place a finger (most likely the one you took off the first string) on the third fret of the B string and strum down only to the B string. Then take that finger off the B string and strum the G chord once more, this time again only going as far as the B string, which is now an open string. So far, so good?

Okay, then. We’re good to move to the rest of this line (the “…dressed in holiday style…” part):

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The melody note at this point moves way up to the B note found on the seventh fret of the high E (first) string, so that means we’re not going to find an open position chord that allows us to easily reach that note. So we’ve got to make an adjustment. Fortunately, the accompanying chord with this part of the melody is G7, so this adjustment turns out to be a very simple one that uses just two fingers.

In case you’re interested in such things, or if you’re someone who might like to learn something that you can use later on in your musical and guitar life, what we’re going to do is use a different voicing of G7 that is derived from our open position D7 chord. Basically we’re moving the D7 chord five frets further up the neck, where it becomes a G7 chord. We can simplify this even further by opening up the G string since G is, after all, part of the G7 chord.

But since the A note that is located at the fifth fret of the high E (sixth) string is the next note in the melody, it makes sense to try to finger this part of the song in a way that will allow you to get all the needed notes. I suggest getting your middle finger onto the sixth fret of the B string and also having your index finger in place on the fifth fret of the high E (sixth) string. Now use either your ring finger or pinky to get the B note at the seventh fret of that same string.

If you do want to read up a bit of the use of open shapes up the neck, then mosey on over to the Guitar Column titled Moving On Up and hopefully this will make a bit more sense.

The first full measure of this section starts out with a slightly different voicing of our normal open position C chord. Just use your pinky to get the G note at the third fret of the high E (sixth) string and you’ll be fine. You can strum the full E7 chord, but I like the sound of the descending bass line, going from C to B and finally to A for the Am chord. Another option would be a different voicing for E7/B (x22130) that brings the D note out on the B string. Try both out and see which you prefer. Then be sure to try them out at tempo to see if you can make the changes from chord to chord!

Example 3 deals with the line “…in the air there’s a feeling of Christmas…”

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Once again our melody note, the A at the fifth fret of the high E (sixth) string, is a little out of the stretch of our open position chords, but simply laying your finger of choice across the first four strings at the fifth fret gives you an Am7 chord. You might want to use your ring finger for this as that will give you time to shift to the G note (third fret of the first string) with your index finger. The rest of this phrase consists of careful strumming of the D, Dmaj7 and D7 chords. Take your time practicing this. Listen to yourself play and bring out the melody note with your strumming, especially if you’re using a pick. With fingers, it’s somewhat easier in that you can strum down with your thumb until just before the string with the melody note and then pick that string on the upstroke with a finger. Either way, though, let the melody be your guide. If you can’t hear the melody as you play, then you need to concentrate on being accurate with your picking.

At this point, Silver Bells repeats the opening phrase that we covered in Examples 1 and 2. The last line of the verse (“…and on every street corner you hear…”) is almost an exact copy of Example 3, but it does have a slightly different melodic ending:

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As you can see and hear, this final phrase mirrors our last example up until we get to the D9/A chord. This isn’t all that different from the Am7 used to start the phrase. Use your ring finger to cover the first three strings at the fifth fret and your index finger to play the F# note at the fourth fret of the D string. The open A string serves as your bass note. This is a particularly cool sounding, jazzy sort of chord that you’ll need again in this song. But that shouldn’t stop you from using it in other songs as well. It can serve as a wonderful chord substitution for D7, so be sure to try it out.

I also throw in a little ending for the verse in the final two measures, just to fill in some space. If you’re going strictly with your fingers, try pinching the D and B strings and leave the G string alone. You might find it more to your liking.

Shall we move on to the chorus? One of the inherent challenges here is that there is a lot of time between the first singing of “Silver Bells” and the second. So I’ve taken the liberty of throwing in a simple little fill:

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Now, there are a lot of different ways we could have gone with this. Many arrangements simply repeat the melodic phrase of “silver bells” twice, but I wanted to try something a little different. Plus, I wanted you to have something that was somewhat challenging for a beginner but certainly not, pardon the pun, out of his or her reach.

The trick here is to fret your G chord at the start of the chorus differently than many of you probably do. Use your ring finger for the low E (sixth) string and your middle finger on the A string. This frees up your index finger for the C note at the first fret of the B string and also keeps your pinky ready for the D note at the third fret of the B string. Then your index finger is ready to get all the non-open string notes in both fills. You’ll be able to pick this up faster than you think.

If this sounds a little weird, it’s because I made a chord substitution in the second half. Normally you’d want a C chord there, but I’m using Am7 in order to maintain relatively easy fingering for the melody notes along the high E (first) string. The notes of a C chord, as you know (or can find out by reading any of our easy theory articles here at Guitar Noise are C, E and G. The notes of Am7 are A, C, E and G. That’s pretty close. You could even argue that it’s a C6 chord with the A note in the bass.

But the main reason I choose to make this substitution was, as I mentioned, to keep the fingering of the melody simple. Try using a C chord and see which way you like best.

As with the second and fourth phrases of the verse, the second and fourth phrases of the chorus are almost identical. So let’s tackle them together:

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I told you we’d run into that D9/A chord again. Both these phrases are relatively simply. You just want to be careful with the timing differences in the second measure.

In Example 6 we end with a single-note walking bass line, starting from the D note of the open D string down through C, B and A on the A string to G on the low E (sixth) string. For Example 7 we end with a repeat of the closing phrase from the verse.

All right, then, let’s try out putting the verse and the chorus together:

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I guess we can officially declare the holiday season open, as we’ve now got two song lessons online already. And, as always, I hope that you’ve enjoyed this little exercise in chord melody arrangement and that you get a chance to play it for your family and friends during the upcoming holidays.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

I now have quite a few students who play finger-style, and some who use a guitar pick. So, I decide to write an easy arrangement that either one can play. It’s a short little arrangement of “The First Noel.”

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If you master this quick, you could add more and build upon it. Each one of the chords is played as a chord with the melody note being the highest pitch. Whenever you play a chord, the highest pitch is the most distinct. So keep this in mind when you start to try and put melody and chords together.

The D6 and F#m chords should have an independent finger per string. The Bm7, Bm, Gmaj7, Dmaj7, D (except for the ending chord), and A7 chords require a barred finger somewhere.

This is more of a Christmas Song Arrangement present for you guys other than an actual lesson. Please take a listen to the audio that is available here:

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I do have a quick video that matches the audio. E-mail me at petersimms.guitarman@gmail.com and ask for it. I will be happy to send it to you. If have questions about this song, please e-mail me and ask. I would also be happy to help you. Enjoy!