songs for intermediates

John Lennon’s Imagine is usually thought of as a piano song. We’re going to do a thoughtful arrangement for the solo guitarist.

Here’s a wonderful arrangement of this beautiful and haunting song from the pen of John Lennon. While we won’t be using the straight-from-the-record Travis picking style, we will more than make up for it by using many aspects of chord melody playing to make this both easier and challenging at the same time.

On the surface, there’s not an awful lot to this short, yet powerfully moving song. Because of the structure of the song, it’s very much up to the single guitarist to make this an interesting arrangement. And that’s what we’ll do with an arrangement that is interesting, challenging and also gives us some things that we can use in our every day guitar playing.

The classic Elton John song gets the Guitar Noise treatment. We’ve a terrific finger style arrangement for you, good enough to make you think you’re playing a piano! And, of course, I make sure to throw in enough interesting theory bits to remind you that it is, indeed, after all, a lesson!

Let’s kick off the year with a bit of a challenge. Here you’ll find step by step instructions for playing the second acoustic guitar part of this terrific song. Since this particular guitar part involves the four basic guitar techniques (hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides and bends), you’ll find it a great way to start learning how to play solos.

After spending the past few lessons developing bass lines, let’s turn our attention to melody. This Neil Young classic lends itself nicely to learning how to integrate a song’s melody into your strumming. Plus we’ll continue our work with arpeggio and partial chord picking.

There’s something for everyone in this single guitar arrangement – walking bass lines, a mixture of strumming techniques and it’s a waltz!

We’ll use Simple Twist of Fate as a lesson in chord progressions and chord construction in open tuning. We’ll also practice strumming and work on string muting.

We’re going to take this four chord song and make a breathtaking solo guitar arrangement for it. It’s a great work out for finger-style guitar.

Our version of this Beatles classic is based on the original and adds a few new things to make it more suitable for a solo guitar performance.

We’re going to use this song by Supertramp to work on the concept of chord shapes and different voicings. This is a great arrangement for the solo guitarist.

Quite often, the next step is nothing more than relearning things you already know. To illustrate this, let’s look at the song Moondance by Van Morrison. It’s an intriguing piece in that while it is very easy to play (chord-wise), it does take a little thought to make it sound good.

This Paul McCartney song is good way for the solo guitarist to show off. It is also a excellent song to exercise and practice finger stretching.

We’re going to do a fun solo arrangement of this song from David Gray’s 1999 album White Ladder. This is the first lesson in our series of intermediate songs.