FRANCISCO CHAVES
B l o g
Arranging songs for guitar
You learned the basic guitar chords. You can even do bar chords. You play your favorite songs but they all sound kind of the same. You are constantly playing always the same simple chords with the same strumming patterns. As "Axis of Awesome" showed us (1) , many hit songs use only four chords that you can repeat over and over again.
In the beginning, it's fun to learn and you feel awesome for doing it and you impress your friends. After some time, it becomes repetitive and boring. What can you do to take your guitar skills to the next level?
Level 1 - Learn finger picking
The first thing is quite easy to do: Stop strumming and start finger picking! This will make you distinguish yourself from other guitarists who constantly strum. The internet and youtube are filled with tutorials to help you learn that. (2) (3)
This is only the first and most basic step. If this is not enough to you, go to level 2!
Level 2 - Play with dynamics
What are dynamics? In short, it's how soft you loud you play. Don't be that person who always strums super loud all the chords from beginning to end. Or that one that plays soft finger picking all the time. Use a wide set of dynamics. One of the possible formulas for songs is:
- Play the intro softly. Go into verse.
- Verse gets louder and more intense little by little.
- Play chorus loud and in an intense way.
- To finish the song, gradually start playing softer and softer until you end.
This is a very basic formula of the hundreds of combinations that exists. You can try out and see what works and doesn't. You don't need to keep the same strumming pattern all the time. Your audience will get bored of it, that's why changing the strumming pattern or the loudness/intensity of your playing can have a profound emotional impact on your audience.
Level 3 - Learn new techniques
The guitar is not only about finger picking and strumming. Harmonics are a technique usually beginners are not familiar with. You should definitely give them a try. Here is a tutorial explaining what they are and how to perform them. (4)
Playing in other parts of the guitar can also change your tone and that can be a useful technique to use on your arrangements. If you play with your right hand very close to the bridge (sul ponticello), you will get a sharper sound. If you play near the neck (sul tasto) you will get a warmer and mellower sound. People tend to avoid "sul ponticello" sound because "it sounds ugly". However, flamenco players, for example, use that technique a lot to get brighter and more sharp scales. You should try out these techniques and use them in combination with dynamics, that we talked about already in level 2.
Level 4 - Play chords in different regions of the guitar
This level is a bit harder. To really master it, it requires a bit of music theory knowledge and knowing your guitar inside out.
As you may know (or not), every chord can be played in many different ways. The most common and easy example is the G Major chord. You can play with open strings or as a bar chord. Both of these pictures show a G Major chord:
But what if I told you that this:
or this:
Are also a G Major chord? Which one should you play then? They all sound so different! There is no right and definitive answer to that question, unfortunately. You can play in the chorus one version of G Major, and in the verse another version of G Major, for example. That variety is interesting and makes listeners engage more with your music.
So, how do you find out all the possible combinations?
You have two ways:
- Memorizing A LOT of patterns and then transpose them along the neck of the guitar
- Learn music theory, knowing precisely which notes each chord contains.
A bit of music theory
I will try to summarize this complicated process as best as I can, but it goes like this:
- Major chords are composed of 3 notes: The root note, which gives the name to the chord, another note FOUR halfsteps above it, and another note THREE half steps above the second note (if you don't know what a half step is, you can watch this tutorial (5) ). So G Major, is composed of 3 notes: G, B (4 half steps higher than G) and D (3 half steps higher than B).
- This means, that you just need to play these 3 notes and you will be playing the right chord, doesn't matter where they are on the guitar.
- Then you need to find those notes on the guitar, luckily, those 3 notes happen to be 3 open strings. Therefore, you can just play those 3 open strings (and no other notes!) and you would be playing the correct chord. it results in this:
Giving it a small twist
But this is way too basic, and we have the first string free to play, so, instead of playing the D in the 4th string, we can play it in the first string. That would be very high, in the tenth fret, but that is no problem because the other 2 notes are open strings, so it's very easy to play. This is the result:
Let's imagine now we add an easy finger picking pattern to this chord:
This is already a much more sophisticated solution compared to strumming a G Major chord. If you start your song or arrangement like this, although you are playing exactly the same chord as other players, you are creating a completely different landscape. Watch how guitarist Julia Lange combines all the techniques I talked about and made a stunning version of "All of me" by John Legend (6). She plays the melody instead of singing it, which makes it harder to play, but you can use these skills to accompany yourself singing. These techniques are not only meant for non-singing guitarists.
Have fun and use these tips to take your guitar skills to a whole new level!
Useful links / Sources:
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ
2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cn6U3V9dNI
3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJjWcGzdhBA
4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AURqh9rsI
