“Talent is a pursued interest. Anything that you’re willing to practice, you can do.” – Bob Ross
Create your own guitar arrangement
Most people would love to create their own fingerstyle guitar arrangements, but they have no idea where to start. With these guides, I will easily teach you my simple method for transcribing music to guitar. This is exactly how I created the 500+ posts on this blog over the past 10 years.
These guides will:
✓ Teach you how to create your own arrangement.
✓ Teach you simple, actionable music theory.
✓ Give you a much greater understanding of the TABs I create on this blog.
✓ Improve your playing technique exponentially.
✓ Show you how to immediately begin creating your own music.
This will be a series of posts (containing lots of videos and guitar tabs) explaining my step-by-step process. Down the road, I’ll add more advanced concepts like, alternate turnings.
Before we start, we’ll establish some principles:
Keep your music ASAP (As Simple As Possible)
I’m a huge fan of composer/guitarist Gustavo Santaolalla His film score music is the whole reason I started this blog in 2010. He plays a very simple and minimal style of guitar (and music in general). I prefer to play this way because it’s peaceful and sounds far better than complexity.
Arpeggiate your chords
I lifted this fingerstyle technique from Gustavo Santaolalla. Each chord is comprised of 4 notes on 4 strings. You’ll line your thumb, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd fingers with the strings and pluck in succession. After a few tries it becomes really smooth and efficient.
Voicing the chord this way sounds far more elegant than any alternative. Use this post + TAB to easily learn this technique.
Stay with the first three frets…mostly
If you take any given song + TAB on this blog, you notice that 80% of the time, I stay within the first 3 frets. [Or, the first three frets following a capo.]
The guitar resonates better in this position, as we have access to all of the open strings. Additionally, it’s easier to play chords within the first three frets — and weave a melody between them.
This is not say that we won’t deviate and go to the 4th or 5th fret. Sometimes our musical trajectory demands that we do so. However, we will keep it ASAP (As Simple As Possible).
Be positionally sound
In both The C Position and The G Position, will be playing 8 basic chord shapes – and just a few variations. Each position has a corresponding scale as well. As long as you are positionally sound (to borrow a sports analogy) everything you play will sound reasonably good. This is what it means to play in key.
Get Started: