Every breath you take

Palm mute on an electric guitar to get that sound.

Yes, it's arpeggios:

https://www.guitarnoise.com/lessons/easy-guitar-riffs-80s/

I wouldn't class this one as an easy song - it's got some rather awkward stretches, and it's all barre chords.

You could call the melody arpeggios, but it's not really 'straight' arpeggios. I use alternate picking rather than sweep, because the pattern changes somewhat - the third and fourth chords are different from the others... alternate picking gives me identical hand motion regardless of the chord - all I have to do is adjust for the string skip.

There are only two string patterns used in the song:

6 5 4 5 3 4 5 4 (two times for each chord every time it's used - this is the pattern the song starts with)

5 4 3 4 3 4 5 4 (one time each on the third and fourth chords of the verses... two times for the last chord of the chorus)

You could call the melody arpeggios, but it's not really 'straight' arpeggios.

That's a good point.

I was also surprised to see this in the "easy riffs" article, given the difficult stretches that are involved. Good practice though. :)

thanks guys, actually i could very easily play the chords so thought that this might be easy too...

I needed a place to ask this question so i chose this one.Mods can move this thread to its appropriate place , if they want to.

Now i am printing out the tab and gonna try this on my good ol' classical guitar :wink:

Rahul

This has been a difficult riff for me to nail so far. I can't seem to form the second bar chord that stretches from the 2nd to the 6th fret. And when I try just jumping from note to note with my fretting finger, I can't hit them accurately enough. I've been messing around with this riff for months too!!

Ouch! Easy riff - lol

Hmm. What about tuning the D to a E and the G to a A - that should work. But perhaps there are more chords than in Hackett's article?

Good practice though!

Lars

mmmm....
I also knew it used an alternate tuning...

I'll need to try out that tuning and see... I have a song book that includes this song and there is maybe one other chord in the "you belong to me" part that might be a little different.

Actually there seem to be a number of solutions to make this a little bit more playable for mortals.

E.g. the third and fourth chord in the lesson can just as well be played x5775x (D9) and x7997x (E9) - I see no good reason not to do it like that (pick 2-3-5-3-4-3-2-3)

Think I will be working on this for a while
Lars