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

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.

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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:

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“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:

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

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:

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

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:

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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:

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

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

Here are the good ways:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E03KVay2Gq0

If you are serious about your playing, and would like to learn to play better than you do now, instead of just learning “more stuff” and playing it the same way, I urge you to visit www.guitarprinciples.com, where you will find the knowledge and training that will enable you to achieve your highest potential as a guitarist.

You can still find David’s original text for this lesson here: While My Guitar Gently Weeps -- A Finger Style / Chord Melody Arrangement

Or, if you prefer, there is a “condensed tablature version” that David created for the Guitar Noise blog here: Download gif (Right-click and “Save as”)

As always, please feel free to come by the Guitar Principles website (Guitar Principles) and drop me a line if you have any questions or comments.

Don’t miss Part 1 (Performance Notes) and Part 2 (Performance Notes for the Verses) of this lesson!

This means applying force to the strings in such a way that unnecessary tension is minimized and eliminated, and necessary tension is balanced when applied, and released when its job is done. That is what I am doing when you see me play. The video for this lesson can be found here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAjCxfTH1fc

You can still find David’s original text for this lesson here: While My Guitar Gently Weeps -- A Finger Style / Chord Melody Arrangement

Or, if you prefer, there is a “condensed tablature version” that David created for the Guitar Noise blog here: Download gif (Right-click and “Save as”)

If you are serious about your playing, and would like to learn to play better than you do now, instead of just learning “more stuff” and playing it the same way, I urge you to visit www.guitarprinciples.com, where you will find the knowledge and training that will enable you to achieve your highest potential as a guitarist. Please feel free to come by the Guitar Principles website (Guitar Principles) and drop me a line if you have any questions or comments.

Don’t miss the other two parts of this series: Part 1 -- Performance Notes and Part 3 -- Performance Notes for the Bridge.

Beyond the fingering, much of what I will explain to you would not otherwise be obvious, or even visible to you. This is because much of what developed players are doing when they play, all those things that “make it look easy”, are, in fact, invisible. You would never know what I or some other player is really doing just by watching. Much of the time, the player doesn’t really know themselves!

Well, you’re going to know now!

At Guitar Principles, we are dedicated to your excellence as a guitar player, and my system of learning and playing guitar is for those of you who are likewise dedicated to your excellence. You are going to see, in this lesson, the application of many aspects of my methods, and it will help you greatly to play this piece and everything else you play.

For those players who would like to go deeper, from the application of these methods of guitar mastery, to the actual foundation of them, you are always welcome to visit Guitar Principles, where you will find the knowledge and training that will enable you to master all the wonderful music, like this arrangement by David Hodge, that you find on www.guitarnoise.com!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P76DWglLsPE

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

Don’t miss the next two parts of this lesson: Part 2 -- Performance Notes for the Verses and Part 3 -- Performance Notes for the Bridge.

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:

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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:

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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.

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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

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

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

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

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!

These arrangements are also known as chord melodies. You can still create wonderful chord melodies with just a pick. The idea is to add chords to the melody of a song. Jazz guys love to use this term instead of solo guitar playing (which the classical guys like to call it). Either way, the concept is similar and sometimes exactly the same.

I’m presenting to you the classic jazz standard Autumn Leaves to demonstrate this technique. I’m assuming that you know what repeat signs and 1st and 2nd ending signs are. If not, please check out Tom Serb’s lesson on these at: Standard Notation – Part 2.

There are 3 documents and 2 audio samples to this lesson:

#1 Lead Sheet (this is just the melody with chord symbols to indicate the harmony to be used with the melody)

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#2 Chord Diagram (these are the fingerings for the chords that I decided to use with the melody)

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#3 Chord Melody (this is the arrangement I came up with in order to be able to use just a guitar pick)

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#4 Audio Sample – 1 (the chord melody played slowly by me)

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#5 Audio Sample – 2 (the chord melody played with embellishments by me)

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* you can e-mail me and ask for the videos to both audio samples (these audio samples were taken directly from the videos).

My initial approach is simple. I first learn the melody, I look for chords that can be used to play with the melody, and I make adjustments to those areas that don’t fit easily. Always remember to “think out of the box” when you hit these areas; they always come up. If you don’t panic, try to think of alternative ways to solve the problem, and remember there are times when “just the melody” works, you will get through 99% of you songs. Whatever you try, don’t worry about rules! The only thing you need to know is “if it sounds good – keep it and if it sounds bad – change it”.

Your “To Do” List:

• Learn the melody I presented.
• Take a look at the chord chart. There are countless chord fingerings. I recommend that you learn how chords are constructed. Eventually it is not that difficult to create and manipulate chord fingerings. It’s by far the best path to creating these nice little arrangements.
• Try playing the arrangement – listen to audio sample -1 on this webpage first.
• Try and examine “how” I put it together. If you try to put a chord melody together, keep it simple. As you create more chord melodies, you will gain new techniques, and the more difficult ones will be attainable.

Ballads are always good to start with. After you have half a dozen or so of them, you will probably want to play something that has a “groove” to it. That is another ball game and I’m not going to cover that in this lesson.

There “is” another step farther you can take the ballads to. After you have a ballad under belt and can play it fairly well, you can add little riffs (motifs -musical lines from scales) to it. When you end a phrase, that’s the time to add you stuff! I did this and added an audio sample -2 for you to listen to. This will give you an idea of what I’m talking about. I will cover improvisation within a chord melody in another lesson, that is, if you guys/gals e-mail and request it.

Ok…. Good Luck and if you would like a video of me playing this arrangement, e-mail me at petersimms.guitarman@gmail.com . I will be more than happy to send it your way.

Have Fun! … Peter Simms

Nope… I accidentally let my Domain Name www.petersimms.com expire and someone purchased it before I could buy it back. Thus, this person or corporation is using my name and IT’S NOT ME. Please be aware! At this point you can e-mail me at petersimms.guitarman@gmail.com

Enough said, let’s play!

I wrote a somewhat easy finger-style song for you this time. You will need to lower your 6th string to a “D”. This is called Drop D Tuning. Thus, the Bass strings are D(6)-A(5)-D(4). This makes it easy to create a nifty bass line for the chord “D” without fingering any strings. They can ring together while you’re playing on the treble strings 1-2-3. This song takes full advantage of this opportunity. Be sure to pluck the bass strings with only your thumb. It will sound better.

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Before trying this one, take a listen to the MP3 link on this page. Remember to “right click” on it and use the “save target as” selection. This way you can download the MP3 to your computer and read it while you look at the lesson online.

Most of the finger-picking in Waterfalls is done with your thumb, index, and middle finger. There is a point where you will probably use your ring finger. This is at the end of each of the first three measures on the second line of the song. I’m assuming you know what repeat signs are (the fat/skinny lines with the two dots). If not, be sure to repeat the sections that are between them. When you listen to the MP3 while looking at the music, you will know what I mean.

I think that about covers it. You will need to give it a try! If you would like a Quicktime Video of me playing this song, e-mail me and just ask! I’ll e-mail one your way.

Have Fun!

Not too long ago, someone posted a request up our “Easy Song Database” page over on the Guitar Noise Forums concerning the Dire Straits song Walk of Life. The request wasn’t for the chords or tab, but rather for help with strumming the song. It’d been ages since I’d heard it but I did remember that the rhythm guitar part is simply a rock shuffle, such as those covered in our Easy Songs for Beginners’ lesson on Roll Over Beethoven.

But as good as that shuffle sounds when playing the recording, or playing in a group, it sounds a little bare when attempted with a single guitar. So I played around a bit with the song and with the idea of doing Walk of Life as a single guitar arrangement and came up with this lesson. More of a “mini-lesson,” really.

And even though this is on the “Intermediates” page (or perhaps the “Song Arranging” page…), it’s not beyond the grasp of a beginner who is willing to do a little concentrated practice and work.

So let’s get the preliminaries out of the way and get going…

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, Walk of Life is made up of an introduction and three verses. The introduction is the part that has the fun little organ / keyboard part that pretty much serves as the “signature riff” or main musical hook of the song.

In the original recording, the song is in the key of E and the timing is a quick 4 /4 (I think the BPM is around 176). And here’s a cheat sheet to guide you along:

Now I don’t know about you, but playing a B chord is not usually my idea of a good time. B7 would certainly be a fine substitution, but if I was intent on playing a rock shuffle style of rhythm, then I’d definitely find myself wishing my fingers were about two inches longer than they are.

Basically, any song arrangement that you decide to come up with has to ultimately meet certain criteria. First, can you play it? Second, if you’re singing the lyrics, can you play and sing it at the same time? Third, how much of the flavor of the original song can you take with you (and that’s assuming you want to do that)? And finally, do you (and hopefully your audience) like what you’ve come up with?

Because of my initial thoughts about Walk of Life and the rock shuffle rhythm of the guitar, I was a little bit annoyed to find that, given my voice at least, the song sounded pretty weak. So I knew that I was going to have to come up with a different approach to my rhythm for this arrangement.

The other thing that I really wanted to do was to incorporate the keyboard riff into this single-guitar version. I feel that it really defines the song and helps to keep it moving along. And it’s so silly and cheerful…

So the first thing I figured out was the keyboard part, putting it all on one string:

Having gotten this far, I now needed to find someplace on the guitar where I could play this all without having to shift hand positions too much. “Too much” meaning “not at all” if I could possible manage it. That also turned out to be easy:

So far so good! And it looks like I’m luckier than I deserve. Every note is within a two-fret span, all based around the seventh fret. A quick memory check reminds me that an A-shaped barre chord at the seventh fret is, indeed, E (X79997), so now I’ve got a different decision to make: barre chords or capo?

If you’ve read any of my lessons, you already know that this isn’t much of a decision, for me at least. One of the strengths of the single guitar is allowing the open strings to ring out and give you a bright, vibrant tone. And that’s certainly part of the atmosphere for this song.

So I placed a capo on the seventh fret and transposed the chords from the key of E to the key of A (and you’ve all ready our article titled Turning Notes Into Stone – The Basics of Transposing, so I don’t have to spell that out here, right?) and found nice, friendly first position chords of A, D and E. Then I tried out the riff, placing it into the context of the new chords:

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It was playing this riff out a few times that gave me a few more ideas. Hitting the D and G strings in the third measure, I played around with filling out the rhythm a bit. Nothing very fancy, just something to fill the space. And after some playing around, I found the basic strumming I was looking for, pretty much based off of the keyboard riff. Yes, it’s a bit generic, but it moves along and allows me to sing and play at the same time:

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Even better: using this pattern as a template, I could me to work the riff right into the strumming without missing a beat or having the whole bottom of the song drop out on me. I could even flub a note here and there and it wouldn’t matter all that much as long as I held the main chord shape in place:

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Toying around a little more, I also found that I could add a variation of the keyboard riff, using some harmony to spice it up a bit:

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That added some extra texture and only involved flattening out my index finger on the second fret and then adding the ring finger to the fifth. It did (and still does) require a little practice. And will probably still need more over the months to come.

So here’s the somewhat finished product:

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I say “somewhat” finished because all arrangements tend to be works in progress. The next time I play this song, I may find something else to do with it.

As always, I hope that you’ve had fun with this lesson and I thank you for taking the trip through making this arrangement of Walk of Life with me. Ultimately, any song arrangement that you come up with will evolve over time. The more you learn about guitar and music, the more you can put into an arrangement, even if it’s a matter of keeping things relatively sparse and tossing in a few hooks here and there.

And as a totally silly side note, I always thought that if someone wanted to open a restaurant combining Chinese and health food, “Wok of Life” might be a good name…

And my thanks to the Guitar Noise Forum member who goes by the name of “Shady Harrison” for posting his request in the first place.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Case in point: this particular arrangement of Blue Christmas, the holiday classic penned by Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson. While most people will forever identify this song with Elvis (whose 1957 rendition is perhaps the best known cover), Blue Christmas was already a country holiday staple, thanks to Ernest Tubb, who made it a hit almost ten years earlier. Since then, it’s been recorded by more artists than you can shake a candy cane at – from the Beach Boys to Billy Idol, from Jon Bon Jovi to Brian Setzer, from Sheryl Crow to the Partridge Family, from Lawrence Welk to Collective Soul, from Fats Domino to the Ventures to Anne and Nancy Wilson of Heart. I guess it’s time to add your name to the list!

As we’ve discussed in other chord melody articles, there are many, many ways of coming up with arrangements. You (obviously) need chords and a melody, plus the occasional hit of inspiration. The arrangement for this lesson grew out of a gig I played last Christmas, where I was given the task of soloing over half a verse of Blue Christmas. After trying out a few ideas, I found myself coming back over and over again to the melody itself, mostly because it’s so wonderfully expressive, it doesn’t need a lot of frills. To give it a little more body, I used pairs of notes, much in the style of our lessons on Bookends or, to keep in the holiday spirit, O Tannenbaum. The simple addition of a few bass notes made the arrangement a little more complete.

The other aspect of this song arrangement that I enjoy is the use of sliding pairs of notes to fill in space. There’s a lot of space in this song and it’s silly to fill every lull with as many sixteenth and thirty-second notes that you can squeeze out. Especially when an elegantly placed slide will say things a lot more gracefully.

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’ll be playing Blue Christmas in the key of C. I honestly don’t know what key it was originally written in! C seems to work well for what we want to do today. Structurally, the song is eight lines long, with the melody and chords of the first two lines repeated in Lines Five and Six. Line Seven follows most of Line Three (the last few notes and last chord are different). So it shouldn’t take us all that long to work all this out.

And right in the very first line, we’ll see how using slides as an option can make the melody a little more expressive:

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In Example 1 (A), we play the first line straight, with no frills and sticking with open chords. Most people find it easiest to use their ring finger and pinky to fret the third pair of notes, but since you’re going for the open high E and G in the next pair, almost any fingering will do. The tricky part here is the G7 at the very end where you need to finger the F note at the third fret of the D string. But if you use that ring finger and pinky combo just mentioned (ring finger on the third fret of the D string and pinky on the third fret of the B), you should find yourself playing it cleanly and with no problems.

Now, though, let’s take those fingers of the third pair of notes and slide them up from the third fret of the B and D strings to the fifth frets, as shown in Example 1 (B). You want to hit this pair of notes on the third pickup beat and then hit them once again, at the first beat of the first full measure (the word “Blue”), before making the slide. Your index finger is now free to play the C note in the bass (third fret of the A string) in that measure. Repeat the slide at the first beat of the second full measure (on the first syllable of “Christmas”) if you’d like. Some of you might even find you like sliding back to the D and F notes on the second syllable. Be my guest! The object is to experiment with expressiveness, so have some fun!

One thing to note is that as the embellishments, the sliding notes in this particular case, get more involved, I try to take out a few things in order to keep the arrangement fairly simple. So instead of the three bass notes in the first full measure of Example 1 (A), there are only two in Example 1 (B). This gives you a little more breathing room to pull off the slides without getting your fingers all in a tangle!

We drop down to a single added bass note (the open G string) in Example 1 (C). Here, the timing is a little tricky, using a quarter note triplet at the end of that first full measure. You want those last three slides to be played evenly over the third and fourth beats of that measure. It takes a little practice, and it also sounds fine if you cheat a little here and there. At the end of the line, I tack on a final triplet of sliding pairs of notes (and they are slides, not hammer-ons and pull-offs, as mentioned in the MP3 – sorry about that), just to embellish things a little more. Overkill? Possibly. But then again, you can certainly just leave it out…

One of the main reasons behind these embellishments is that the song will repeat this line later on. Line One and Line Five are the same, so I’ll play Example 1 (B) for Line One and then use Example 1 (C) for Line Five when it comes around. You’ll hear this in the final MP3 example.

Moving on to the second line, let’s throw in some hammer-ons and pull-offs create our embellishments:

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Here, I need to apologize a bit for the notation. The first bass note (G at the third fret of the low E (sixth) string) should come on the second beat. It’s not the easiest thing to read and again, I apologize that the software wouldn’t do what I wanted it to…

But getting beyond that, there’s not all that much here to give you any anxiety. Double hammer-ons (or single hammer-ons, for that matter) are not easy if you’ve not tried them before, so please don’t get discouraged! Many people find that exaggerating the hammer aspect of the hammer-on truly helps them get a good ringing note and it does help you get used to the amount of finger strength you’ll need (pardon the pun) to pull it off. Another thing to remember is that you really want to land the tips of your fingers on the strings and let them stay there. Some folks will make a fine initial hammer and then slack off on the notes for some reason. Don’t! Keeping your fingers in place for the full duration of the notes will help you to achieve full sounding hammer-ons.

Likewise with the pull-off in the second full measure of this example (the second syllable of “thinking”). Don’t be afraid to exaggerate the technique in order to get comfortable performing it. Once you can do it, then you can work on finesse. Ideally (and once you get more adept at these techniques), hammer-ons and pull-offs are subtle embellishments, but it’s kind of hard to concentrate on being subtle when you can’t hear yourself! So first things first – get the technique down and then fine tune it.

At the very end of this line, I toss in the first of a couple of walking bass lines that are there to simply fill in a little space. You’ll hear, again in the final MP3 example of this lesson, that instead of playing what’s written, I use Example 1 (C), which I play as Line Five, as a template for Line Six. That’s just one of many possible things you can do, so please give yourself some freedom and kick around as many ideas as you can handle.

It’s a good thing that we’ve done a bit of embellishment so far, because the chords of the third and fourth lines dictate a return to simplicity:

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Some versions of Blue Christmas use a C7 chord throughout the first two full measures of this section. Since there’s not all that much difference, note wise, between Gm (G, Bb and D) and C7 (C, E, G and Bb), and even less between Gm and C9 (C, E, G, Bb and D), I use that knowledge to create a relatively simple game plan for my chord melody arrangement. Laying my ring finger across the third fret of the first three strings gives me the notes I need for melody and harmony line (I could even pluck the B string to fill it out a little more – try it for a really nice touch) and I can get the bass note with my index finger or even my thumb if I’m so inclined.

The D note (third fret of the B string) in the melody (on “green”) technically makes our F chord an “F6″ if you want to be a stickler for details. You can also just think of it as a passing note. Notice again that using the ring and pinky method on “green” frees up your index finger for the F note in the bass (first fret of the low E (sixth) string). Some of you might find it easier to have your thumb play that note. Either way, it’s good to have options. In the measure of “tree,” you can use a descending chromatic walking bass line to go from F to the D root of the D7 chord that starts the next measure.

Speaking of that D7 chord, I’m going to borrow a trick we used way back in the Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, that being to make a C7 chord and slide it up two frets. In the “full song” MP3 file at the end of this lesson you’ll hear the slide of the bass note from C (third fret of the A string) to D (fifth fret of the A string) quite clearly. This fingering of the D7 (which is technically a D9 chord for those of you interested in such things) allows for a lot of ringing strings in these two measures (“…won’t be the same dear…”) that provides a bit of a contrast to the sliding around we’ve done on the first two lines.

We wrap all this up with an ascending chromatic walking bass line (“…if you’re not here with me…”), very similar to those we’ve looked at in our last lesson on walking bass lines, Connecting The Dots, Part 3. We’ve taken the typical G to C bass line and stuck in an additional step (A# and C#) between the A and B notes.

As we noted earlier, the last two lines start out exactly like Lines Three and Four:

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The main difference here is the F#dim7 chord that is used on the word “white.” Fortunately, this chord can be played very easily up on the fourth and fifth frets (XX4545), which it great since the melody note is the A at the fifth fret of the high E (first) string. Because that note is held a bit in the melody line (the symbol that looks like a raised eyebrow (complete with eyeball) is called a “fermata” and it means to “hold” at your discretion), you can give this chord a bit of a slow strum for a nice, effective change of pace in your arrangement.

We’ll follow this up with a series of slides to echo our Line One and (especially) Line Five and then end with a short walking bass line that finishes up at a Cmaj9 chord. When you put it all together, you should have something like this:

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As always, I hope that you’ve enjoyed this little exercise in chord melody arrangement and that you feel free to play it for the upcoming holidays. More importantly, I hope that the main idea of this lesson, embellishing a simple melody with occasional slides, proves to be a technique you use in other songs in your ever-expanding repertoire of songs and/or bag of tricks.

Until our next lesson…

Peace.

As you know from reading any of my lessons here at Guitar Noise, I’m a big supporter of using songs to teach both the basics of music and guitar techniques in general. The logic being that you’re going to be playing songs (at least one supposes so) for your own enjoyment if nothing else and it’s great to make music that sounds like music and not just noodling around.

One of the things I love about this time of year is that holiday songs and Christmas carols fill the air once again. I know that many groan about hearing these songs over and over again (something easily remedied by simply turning a radio off) but I find the melodies of many holiday songs quite captivating. And many of these songs can make great exercises for the beginning or early intermediate guitarist.

Case in point: Today’s carol, O Come All Ye Faithful (also known as Adeste Fideles), offers a host of chord changes that may pose a challenge to the beginner without being beyond his or her abilities. Better yet, these are chords that any guitarist is going to have to come to terms with at some point, so why not now?

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.

Let’s take this apart piece by piece, shall we?

O Come…

We’ll be playing this hymn in the key of C (for “Christmas”) major, if for no other reason than to make this lesson both challenging and pertinent. Many, many songs are in the key of C and the three main chords of this key, C, F and G, are going to be seen time and time and time again in your guitar lives. Getting used to making these particular chord changes cleanly and in time can only help you become a better guitarist.

This is also a great key to play this song because it will involve two versions of the open G chord:

The first is your standard G, while the second is often misnamed “G5,” because of the substitution of the D note at the third fret of the B string for the open B string. This is simply a different voicing of the G chord. If it helps, think of your guitar as a small choir with six singers (your six strings). Normally, singer #2 would be singing a B note and you’ve simply instructed him (or her) to sing D instead. They’re both notes in the G chord, and you still have all three notes (G, B and D) being sung, so you haven’t created a new chord. Nor have you created an inversion (where the bass note of the chord is not the root note). All you’ve done is alter the voicing of the chord. We’ll be doing this with both the G and C chords at some point in this lesson.

In the music notation software that I use, this G chord may be labeled “G2” and you can ignore that as well. Computers can be so stupid sometimes…

To make matters more interesting, we’re using this new voicing of the open G chord voicing in order to get that D note into the melody line. So, in this song arrangement anyway, we’ll not be playing the high E (first) string anytime we play the “G (high D)” chord.

This decision will also make fingering this “G (high D)” chord a little smoother when played with the other chords in the songs. Most of the time, you’ll want to use your pinky on the D note (third fret of the B string), your middle finger on the B note (second fret of the A string) and your ring finger for the G in the bass (third fret of the low E (sixth) string). Playing the “G (high D)” chord with this fingering will leave your index finger free, and that will be very helpful in a couple of places in the song.

Okay, if you’re square with this new chord voicing, then let’s get going and look at the first line:

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You’ll hear, in the MP3 files accompanying this lesson, that mostly I’m playing this carol with my fingers, actually just strumming down with the thumb to get a kind of “shimmery” effect. Later, in the full MP3, I’ll also use my thumb for the bass note and my fingers (ring, middle and index) to pinch the other notes of the chord and melody. You can certainly play this song with a pick as well. I tried to make this arrangement so that it could be played in any number of ways.

We’ll start out nice and easy, using half notes (two beats each) for the accompanying chords. In the second measure we immediately find the “G (high D)” chord and it should be an easy transition from the C chord in the first measure. Starting with the C chord, simply shift your ring finger from the third fret of the A string (C) to the third fret of the low E (sixth) string (G). At the same time, move your middle finger from the second fret of the D string to the second fret of the A. Now you place your pinky on the third fret of the B string and there you have it!

Measures 3 and 4 (“…joyful and triumphant…”) give you a chance to really work on these chord changes, throwing in an F on the fourth beat of Measure 3 just to make things interesting. Here I like to use F/C, simply to pound out that C note in the bass and make the song a little more driving. Also, it’s easier for most folks than going with a fully barred F chord. The full F is fine, as is a “beginners’ F” (XX3211). You need to have that F note at the first fret of the high E (first) string in the melody, so Fmaj7 (XX3210) wouldn’t work here.

And, just to drive the point home, you should find that it’s easy to get the C note (first fret of the B string) at the end of Measure 4 if your index finger is free. That’s one reason why we discussed how to finger the “G (high D)” chord in the first place!

Moving on to the second line (Measures 5 through 8):

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Here we add a smidgen of a walking bass line (can’t get away from those, can we?) by going from the A (open A string) of the Am chord that kicks of Measure 5 and then playing the G (third fret of the low E) en route to the F# at the second fret of the low E (sixth) string. Since the B note is the melody at this point, we technically have a D6 chord (okay, D6/F# since the F# is in the bass), but most folks would just say it’s a D chord with the B in the melody being a “passing tone.” Whatever makes you happy…

To get the F# in the bass, many people would wrap their thumbs over the top of the neck of the guitar. When doing so, remember that you just need as much (read “as little”) of your thumb to get the note cleanly. But because this D chord has one other fretted note (the A at the second fret of the G string), it’s also feasible to use your middle finger to fret the F# in the bass, especially since you can then simply slide that finger up a fret to get the G note of the G chord.

In Measure 6, there’s also a walking bass line, a la You Are My Sunshine, although we stack chords on top of it each step of the way. The “G (high D)” at the third beat should technically be labeled “G (high D) / B” but my feeling at this point is that I shouldn’t turn the chord charts into an encyclopedia!

And here are two quick note concerning Measures 5 and 6: Sometimes I find myself playing the D6 chord along with the melody on both the third and fourth beats of Measure 5, simply strumming it all the way down to the B string on the third beat (“ye”) and only down to the G string (“O”) on the fourth. In Measure 6, Am is a perfectly acceptable substitute for the D7/A, which is played on the second beat. Totally up to you…

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The third line, Measures 9 through 12 (“…come and behold him / born the king of angels…”), begin with quick C to F to C chord changes. Again, I’m thinking that using the F/C is a good way to deal with this. As mentioned earlier, you can certainly go for either the full barre F or the “beginners’ F” if you prefer.

In Measure 10, I stick in a single B note (second fret of the A string) in the bass to give the song another tiniest bit of a walking bass line.

Measure 11 has the trickiest chord progression thus far in the Christmas carol, but when you look at it from chord to chord, it’s not all that hard. If you’re using the fingering for the “G (high D)” chord that we agreed upon earlier, then your middle finger gets to sit tight when you change from that “G (high D)” to E7. All you have to do is to pick up your pinky while placing your index finger on the G# at the first fret of the G string.

Going from the Am to the D/F# is probably the most complicated switch and there are many ways to go about it. I find myself playing using either my thumb or first finger or middle finger on the F# in the bass (second fret of the low E (sixth) string) while my ring finger gets the second fret of the G string and the pinky frets the third fret of the B string. Taking a very informal survey while working on this lesson, the middle finger seemed to require less thinking. As they say, “your mileage may vary…”

Regardless of which way I finger the D/F#, I want to make a big effort to use the same fingering I use for the G chord of Measure 12 that I use to play the “G (high D)” throughout the song. Why? This fingering frees up my index finger to easily play both the A (second fret of the G) and C (first fret of the B) that pop up in this measure.

Okay, ready for the big finish?

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The first two lines of our “Finale” section, Measures 13 through 16, have a lot of chord changes, but nothing that should pose any kind of problem for you at this point. At least, not with a little bit of concentrated practicing! It’s mostly a matter of strumming down to the correct melody string. You’ll notice that I use the B note (second fret of the A string) as the bass note for the “G (high D)” chord at the fourth beat of Measure 13 and the second beat of Measure 15. Also the F/C comes into play on the fourth beat of Measure 15.

In Measure 17, though, I’m opting for the full barre F chord in order to make the bass line climb from F to F# (in the D9/F#) to G. This is probably the most complex chord change of the entire song and you’ll want to take your time to work it out. One big thing in your favor is that this is the big climax of the song and you can take a little dramatic liberty by slowing the pace and making the whole passage very “triumphant” sounding.

And, not to leave well enough alone, I can’t resist throwing in one last little moving bass line, using G# (fourth fret of the low E (sixth) string) to climb from G to Am. Don’t be afraid to discard it if it’s not to your liking.

Remember, too, that you can have a lot of fun with the dynamics on this tune, especially during the “finale” section. Start out very softly and get progressively louder with each “O come let us adore him…” Have fun spicing up your arrangement of this arrangement!

And here, warts and all, is a finished version for you to work with:

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

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this little chord melody arrangement of O Come All Ye Faithful and that you feel free to play it for the upcoming holidays. And I hope that all these lessons inspire you to try out making chord melody arrangements of your own. It’s not all that hard to do and there’s no end of satisfaction to coming up with a song arrangement all your own.

And let me take a moment to wish all our readers, their family and friends, a wonderful holiday season. We thank you for your continued support of Guitar Noise and look forward to bringing you even more lessons very, very soon.

Until the next lesson…

Peace

I’ve put together a simple arrangement in the key of G. This arrangement keeps a steady rhythm on the bass, with a low G sounding on beats one and three.

Though this arrangement is relatively simple to play, there is one spot to watch out for. For the first two measures I play the bass note with my third finger. On beat one of measure three, I again play the bass note with my third finger. On beat three, the melody moves to third position, and when making that position change I quickly switch my fingering for the bass note and use my thumb instead. I also play the bass notes in measure five and six with my thumb. I try to let the four eighth notes at the start measures five and six ring together (which is why I chose the fingering across the top three strings).

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

Once again, I hope you’ve enjoyed playing this tune as much as I have.

Nearly every lullaby CD I’ve seen includes Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (though it’s commonly classified as a nursery rhyme), and that’s where I’ll begin. This is one I’ve played many times at bedtime, and it never seems to grow old.

My arrangement is very simple and is played entirely in the first position. For the most part, this tune uses half notes in the bass and quarter notes for the melody. I add harmony notes along with the bass, but you can ignore them if you’d like, making the arrangement even easier to play. One quick performance note: I often play the open G string instead of the C on the first fret of the B string as my harmony note on the C chord (measure two).

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

London Bridge is a well-known nursery rhyme, and I’ve arranged this one in the key of G as well. I like to let notes ring together, and that’s why I start this tune at the third fret. I use my left hand thumb to play the G on the third fret of the low E string in measures one and two. In measure four, I play the G in the bass with my third finger on beat one, and with my thumb on beat three.

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

I hope you (and especially any children you may play them for) enjoy these simple tunes.

Chord melody to the rescue! Guitar Noise has two most excellent articles about chord melody: Arranging Things by David Hodge and The Birth of a Chord Melody by Graham Merry.

You can use a pencil and paper to work on songs but using a software package like Guitar Pro is a lot easier. Guitar Pro lets you enter songs and play them back. It also does hundreds of other things – it would probably take years to explore all the functions – but fortunately it’s also easy to get started.

A software package like this can be an invaluable tool for learning the guitar. For example, I had a hard time figuring out how to play Going to Kansas City just from reading the lesson on this site. So I entered the song into Guitar Pro and, when I played it back, it became clear how the tricky looking triplets should sound.

I entered the “Easy Guitar” version of the song into Guitar Pro and went to work. Lots of decisions had to be made, such as in which key should the song be played. Both Guitar Noise articles mention that the melody should be on the high strings in order to make the melody notes stand out above the accompanying chord and bass notes.

Another decision – what style should be used? The article, Arranging Things, lists three styles of arranging a song:

1. chords
2. double stops
3. fingerstyle

An important decision came next – what notes to use. I tried several times to come up with an arrangement something that sounded good but found that I eventually lost interest because there were just too many decisions to make.

I revisited the project some time later and decided to “keep it simple”. The “Easy Guitar” arrangement was in the key of G so that’s how I left it. I wanted something relatively simple to play so I decided to use double stops, adding just one note of harmony to each melody note. The most important decision was what this note should be. I had been approaching the song as a mathematical exercise – like doing the entire song in intervals of fourths or sixths or always using the first or third of the chord as the base note. Life became easier when I decided to just choose the note that sounded best. If a particular bar was using a G chord, I added the note from the G chord that sounded best. Sometimes I didn’t like any of the chord notes so I then picked the note from the G major scale that sounded best. This certainly forced me into listening to what I was playing.

This is what I’ve done to the first part of the song. Here are the first four bars. I had a hard time picking the best notes from the Dm6 chord but after much discussion with myself, I finally decided on this:

Bars 5 to 8 are a repeat of the first four bars with a small change in bar 7:

My favorite part of the song starts in bar 9. The song slowly ascends until the start of bar 12. It sounds so powerful:

Bar 13 starts with a three-note chord and ends the ascending phrase that started in bar 9. I picked the three best notes to play and discovered that the three notes form a G chord. I tried a D chord here but it didn’t sound right so I stayed with the G chord. Bar 15 starts another ascending phrase. The first note in Bar 15 uses an F for the bass note. An F doesn’t belong in a G chord but it sounds a lot better that an F# here.

Bars 17 –21 finish off the first part of the song: Bar 20 starts with a three-note chord to end the phrase that started in bar 15. I ended this section with two bars of single notes. The single notes sound sad here and fit the mood of the song.

I hope that you enjoy my arrangement of this song and I would be happy to hear any suggestions on how to make it even better.

The verse and chorus are quite similar melodically, so I’ve created a composite melody for this lesson.

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

This is a stark and simple arrangement, and I’ve provided only a single-line melody and the chords. There is a lot a room to add your own ornamentation, variations, and expressive nuances, but a tune like this still sounds wonderful played simply and unadorned.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tune as much as I have. Have a Merry Christmas and a glorious holiday!

Fortunately, there was a great revival of the British carols in the Victorian era (in the first part of the 19th century), including the publication of new collections of the old songs and carols. And so, this is where our brief history lesson ends, and our guitar lesson begins.

One carol that has always caught my ear is The Sussex Carol (also known as On Christmas Night All Christians Sing). The words were originally published in 1684 by Irish bishop Luke Wadding in a collection titled Small Garland of Pious and Godly Songs. The words and melody sung today were collected in the early 20th century (1919) by Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who heard it sung by Harriet Verrall at Monk’s Gate in Sussex.

My arrangement is in standard tuning and offers few technical challenges. This tune is normally notated in 6/4, but I found 6/8 a little more readable when writing it out for guitar. The thumb plays the bass notes on the downbeats (beats one and four in each measure). I bar two I play the F# on beat six with my thumb, but you could also play it with your index finger. In bar nine, there’s a quick switch to 9/8, which moves back to 6/8 in the following measure.

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

I hope to post a few more lessons in the coming weeks featuring Victorian carols, so I hope you have enjoyed this tune as much as I have.

One Christmas hymn that I’ve loved ever since I first heard it is Love Came Down At Christmas. I first heard it in church – it’s in many hymnals including the Methodist and Lutheran hymnals – but Shawn Colvin also did a wonderful job of covering this song on her Holiday Songs and Lullabies CD.

The melody used for Love Came Down is a traditional Irish tune titled Gartan, which can be found in The Complete Petrie Collection of Ancient Irish Music, Part II (1902). The words were written by poet Christina G. Rosetti (1830-94). Several of her poems were used for hymns, including In the Bleak Mid-Winter, which I covered in a lesson last year.

I did this arrangement in DADGAD, a tuning I often use when arranging Irish tunes.I used a capo on the third fret to put the melody in the key of Bb (I’m fingering the tune in G instead of D).

This arrangement starts with a descending bass line to contrast the upward moving melody. I didn’t notate it, but you’ll hear it on the recording – I like to add a quick little half step hammer-on and pull-off starting on the second fret on the first string on beat four. The tricky part of the arrangement comes in measure three, where I finger the C on the third fret of the fifth string with my first finger and the G on the fifth fret of the fourth string with my fourth finger, moving you quickly to third position. I put both fingers down at the same down even though they are played on separate beats. You do the same thing in measure four, playing in second position for the first two beats, and third position on the last two beats.

In measure five, I use an ascending bass line (suggesting E minor instead of G major) for a little variation. Measure seven has the quick jump to third position, just like measure three.

On my recording, I added a second guitar part on the third time through tune. The second part adds the melody played as harmonics using a slightly different tuning, DADGAB, to accomodate the melody.

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

This is a beautiful Christmas hymn, and a fun one to play in DADGAD. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning this tune as much as I have.

Some of my private students came to their lesson playing my last lesson on Guitar Noise (Break of Day) with a guitar pick. It sounded good! I originally wrote it as a fingerpicking song. After talking with them about it, they had one thing in common: it was difficult to pluck with their fingers and they would rather use a pick. When I offered to write some more songs for pick players, they jumped at the idea. Therefore, for you “guitar pickers” I’m here for you!

Key West is a chord melody (solo guitar arrangement) that is to be played with a guitar pick. I would recommend you listen to the mp3 provided and watch the music before attempting to play this song. I included a chord fingering chart that references to the measures in the song. This should give you an idea of how to finger the chords and be able to play the riffs without getting your fingers tangled up.

Key West pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)

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

When looking at some of the chord melodies that are published out there, you will notice that sometimes there are no chord symbols and just the music. Then again, there are some that have every harmony notated. In my biased opinion over the years, I feel that not having any chord symbols can limit the player into typing out the song as written. At the same time, if every harmony is labeled, the player can become overwhelmed with a barrage of chord symbols. I prefer to label the “basic” chord that the harmonies and melody are playing through. This allows the player to understand what the composer is thinking. General chord labeling not only gives the player a concept of what is happening, but he/she can change parts that don’t fit with that player’s style. These are solo guitar arrangements, thus manipulation of a song is not detrimental to the song.

If you decide to add, remove, or change parts, just remember:

if it sounds good, then keep it

and if it sounds bad, then change it.

I hope you have lots of fun with this song, and if you would like a Free Video of me playing this song, just email me and ask!

Enjoy!

Peter Simms
Email: peter@petersimms.com