I was wondering if this is a viable solution to wanting to play songs fingerstyle since most piano sheet music is melody and bass.
Obviously anything below E on the Bass side of the grand staff will have to go away, or at least changed around a bit unless I play in Drop D....which I've noticed alot of fingerstyle stuff is in.
I just bought a fingerstyle book to play the song "Keeper of the Stars", and the arrangement is terrible, sounds nothing...NOTHING...like the song, but the piano book I have does so I figured what the heck, I'll transcribe that...but before I put all this work into it, I thought I'd ask.....do you think it will work?
Thanks!
In Space, no one can hear me sing!
Transcribing just puts something in a different register, clef, or key. When you transcribe, you keep the sounds in the exact relationships they had in the original.
Trouble is, you probably won't be able to play it. Think about how a pianist plays - two hands, a couple octaves apart. So far, so good... the guitar spans about two octaves and a minor third in any one position. But in each hand, the pianist plays notes that can be pretty close together - and the closer together pitches are, the bigger the stretch on a guitar. For a piano to do G#-A is a piece of cake. The same thing on guitar might be xx62xx. Toss in a couple more notes and you end up making a pretzel out of your fretting hand.
What you really want is to arrange the piano music for guitar. Arranging is a skill that takes a while, but here's the basic steps:
1. Identify the melody line. For the average guitarist, this needs to be in the soprano voice.
2. Map out the important chords in the original
3. Work out a bass line that supports the melody and uses chord tones (a 'walking bass' that includes scale tones between chord tones can work too)
4. Go back to the important chords you mapped out, and consider which ones are missing from the bass & melody. Figure out where you can reasonably finger them, and rough out the chord voicings.
5. Now start adjusting... make the 'inside' voices flow smoothly (composition teachers will tell you every line should be singable). If the arrangement sounds thin in spots, figure out how you can decorate it, or double notes in the voices. If you're moving around the fretboard too much, or getting into terribly awkward fingerings, try changing positions (which means starting that spot over from step 3 or 4). Keep tweaking until you get it musical :)
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Thanks for the response to that!
I kind of forgot about some of the changes being kind of awkward like the G# and A being played at the same time...I was thinking why not just xxx1xx and xxx2xx but of course it doesn't work when you play it at the same time LOL.
Thanks for that, I'll have to check on doing some of this later in the week! Might be fun.
In Space, no one can hear me sing!
Transcribing just puts something in a different register, clef, or key. When you transcribe, you keep the sounds in the exact relationships they had in the original.
Trouble is, you probably won't be able to play it. Think about how a pianist plays - two hands, a couple octaves apart. So far, so good... the guitar spans about two octaves and a minor third in any one position. But in each hand, the pianist plays notes that can be pretty close together - and the closer together pitches are, the bigger the stretch on a guitar. For a piano to do G#-A is a piece of cake. The same thing on guitar might be xx62xx. Toss in a couple more notes and you end up making a pretzel out of your fretting hand.
What you really want is to arrange the piano music for guitar. Arranging is a skill that takes a while, but here's the basic steps:
1. Identify the melody line. For the average guitarist, this needs to be in the soprano voice.
2. Map out the important chords in the original
3. Work out a bass line that supports the melody and uses chord tones (a 'walking bass' that includes scale tones between chord tones can work too)
4. Go back to the important chords you mapped out, and consider which ones are missing from the bass & melody. Figure out where you can reasonably finger them, and rough out the chord voicings.
5. Now start adjusting... make the 'inside' voices flow smoothly (composition teachers will tell you every line should be singable). If the arrangement sounds thin in spots, figure out how you can decorate it, or double notes in the voices. If you're moving around the fretboard too much, or getting into terribly awkward fingerings, try changing positions (which means starting that spot over from step 3 or 4). Keep tweaking until you get it musical :)Wow, killer explanation. I'd love to be able to get to the point of theory mastery like you have. How long have you been playing?
violin music is also a good place to find music. it's single lines with the occasional double stop, and the range is within a guitar's range.
How long have you been playing?
Quite a while :)
Music, over 45 years. Guitar a bit less, but I've been teaching guitar for 30+ years now.
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Well, I just got back and started messing around with this and am finding that using Easy Piano books and arranging them for guitar is actually going pretty well. I'll dig deeper when I'm not so tired, but so far so good. I'm actually having a bit of fun figuring some of this stuff out.
In Space, no one can hear me sing!
