Have you ever wondered how on Earth people come up with such beautiful acoustic guitar fingerstyle arrangements of songs? Have you ended up wishing that you could come up with your own arrangements for your favourite songs? Well, in this post you’re going to learn exactly how it’s done!
The great news is that it’s not as hard as you might think. There’s just one crucial thing you need to be able to do, but I’ll explain that later. Don’t worry though because by the end of this post you’ll confidently be able to arrange your very first song for fingerstyle guitar…all on your own!
The other great news is that once you learn the formula for fingerstyle arranging songs, you don’t have to learn any new systems or methods. The approach is exactly the same for every single song that you arrange, no matter how easy or complicated the song may be. How cool is that!?
Am I ready to start arranging songs for fingerstyle guitar?
You don’t need to be a virtuoso to start arranging songs, you don’t even need to be an advanced player, but I would say that you ideally need to be around the intermediate level. Having said that, even if you’re an accomplished beginner you can start and I bet you can still create a good arrangement that you’re really pleased with. You’ll learn a lot in the process too.
What do I need to be able to do so I can arrange songs for fingerstyle?
You should have a reasonably good vocabulary of chords, at a minimum you should be able to play your open position chords and movable barre chords with ease. That’s certainly enough to get you going. Again, even if you’re not quite there yet, you can always learn on the job, which is totally fine and to be encouraged.
It’s pretty obvious but you want to have your basic fingerpicking technique at a level where you don’t have to think about your picking hand too much. You almost want it on autopilot because you’ll need to be focusing most of your attention on your fretting hand and finding all the right notes.
Yes, I did say finding the right notes. This leads us to where a lot of people fall down when it comes to fingerstyle arranging. YOU have to find the notes, not anybody else or any TAB. Essentially, it’s you writing the TAB.
That means learning to play by ear. You might be thinking “Oh great! I do that anyway and it’s just how I play!” or conversely “Well that’s it for me! I have no hope in hell of being able to do that.”
If you’re in the second group then let me reassure you that anyone can learn to play by ear. Honestly, it’s not that hard once you make the commitment and invest the time. At first you’ll be pulling your hair out and always playing the wrong notes but gradually, bit by bit and with every practice session your success rate will go up. Before you know it, instead of having a success rate of just 5%, it’ll be more like 75% and upwards.
Like anything, it’s just a case of practice and the more you do it, the better you become at it. Eventually, it becomes pretty effortless. Remember how hard all those basic open chords were when you first started learning? I bet you don’t even think about changing between them these days.
That covers off what’s required of you to be able to fingerstyle arrange songs, so now let’s get into the nitty gritty of how you actually do it!
Fingerstyle arranging songs in a nutshell
Here’s how to fingerstyle arrange songs in a nutshell:
Step 1: Learn the chords of the song
Step 2: Learn the song’s melody
Step 3: Combine the bass notes of the chords with the melody
That is all you need to do to create your first fingerstyle arrangement.
So let’s break down each step and hopefully by the end of this section you’ll see that fingerstyle arranging songs isn’t rocket science!
Step 1: Learn the chords of the song
You can actually do step 1 or step 2 first, it really doesn’t matter and I chop and change all the time. But today let’s start with learning the chords.
There are two ways to do this. You can go online and find the chords or you can learn them by ear. Both are OK but I’d always encourage you to work them out by ear if you can. The main reason for this is that very often the chords online are completely wrong. As you get better at playing by ear, you’ll start to trust your ears over any chord chart you read online.
A good approach is to give it a go yourself and then check online. Remember, you just need to practice to get your success rate up.
So that’s step 1 done – not too challenging?
Step 2: Learn the song’s melody
While there are almost certainly many chord charts online for the song you want to arrange, I bet there’s only a few (if any) TABs for the melody. And are they correct and in the key of the chords you’ve learnt? Probably not. So you’ve just got to work it out by ear.
Here’s a few tips for helping you work out the melody by ear.
One note a time. Focus on finding just the very first note of the melody, once you’ve got that the other notes probably aren’t all that far away.
Sing or hum the notes as you go, ask yourself if the note you’re trying to find is ascending or descending in pitch.
Try and find the key. Once you’ve realised that the song is in a particular key, the other notes will likely come from that key’s scale (a little theory knowledge can help here).
Slow it down. Use playback settings to slow the song down, YouTube allows you to do this when you click the settings symbol on the video.
Persevere.
Initially work the melody out anywhere on the fretboard just to find all the notes. Once you’ve learnt it, you then want to think about where a sensible place to play it will be.
For instance, if you play the melody too low it will probably interfere with the bass notes. You want to have it quite high so you have room for your thumb to do its magic. Remember, it’s melody on the top, bass notes on the bottom, you need that space between them for your arrangement to really work. So you may have to move the melody up or down an octave so that it doesn’t clash with the bass.
It’s also going to be easier to keep the melody on the lower frets so you can play as many open chords as possible.
Step 3: Combine the bass notes of the chords with the melody
At this point you now have everything you need for your fingerstyle arrangement. You’ve got all the parts of the jigsaw in front of you and now you just have to match them together into the whole picture! Here’s how you do it…
Take the bass note of the chord and sustain it for as long as that chord’s duration.
Then combine that with the melody on top.
Repeat the same process across all remaining bars of the song.
Hey presto! You have your arrangement.
Example:
Here’s an example of this very approach put into action.
Here are the chords to Old Macdonald:
Here’s the melody:
And here it is now combining the bass notes of the chords with the melody:
In its most basic form, this is how you arrange a song for fingerstyle guitar. And hopefully it’s all starting to make sense!
The three steps are 1. chords, 2. melody and 3. combine bass notes of chords with melody. This is enough to get you started and you should now be ready to start arranging on your own.
Taking fingerstyle arranging further
Of course you can take things further, much further, there’s really no limit to how far you can take your fingerstyle arrangement. I go into much more detail and guide you through the whole process in my course on How to Arrange Songs for Fingerstyle Guitar.
This course breaks everything right down into bitesize chunks, making everything much easier to digest. You can even try it out for free when you join my newsletter!
Step 4: Adding filler notes
To start with, you may find that your simple arrangement sounds a little empty. This is when you can add some ‘filler’ notes.
What are filler notes? They’re notes from within the chords that you can play to fill out the sound of your arrangement.
If you have the bass notes on the bottom strings and the melody on the top few strings, then there’s still space between the bass notes and melody for you to play some filler notes.
There are no hard rules here and it really is just a case of experimenting and finding what sounds good, just don’t get in the way of the melody because this should remain true to the song. You can add as few or as many filler notes as you like. My advice, is to go slow and start with just a few and build up from there.
In the example below we have kept the bass notes and the melody of our Old McDonald arrangement exactly the same as before but have added in some notes inbetween. These are our filler notes.
Step 5: Find the right key for your fingerstyle arrangement
One last thing before we wrap up is that you want to consider keys. Maybe you’ve arranged the song in it’s original key, well that’s fine but that key might not necessarily be the best key for your arrangement on the guitar. You may find that the same arrangement works better in another key.
Every time I arrange a song I will try the arrangement out in a few different keys and then I’ll choose the one that works best. How do I know which one is best? Well it’s probably the one that feels the most natural and is the easiest key to play the arrangement in – fitting the chords and melody so you don’t have to play too many big barre chords or big stretches.
Sure, it takes a little more time and effort to transpose but this will ensure you find the perfect key and ultimately yield a better arrangement.
Conclusion
So there you go, I hope now that you feel equipped and ready to arrange your very first song for fingerstyle guitar.
Just remember the 3 essential steps to get your basic arrangement:
Step 1 – Learn the chords of the song
Step 2 – Learn the song’s melody
Step 3 – Combine the bass notes of the chords with the melody
and the optional extra steps:
Step 4 – Add filler notes (notes from within each chord to fill out the sound of the arrangement).
Step 5 – Try multiple keys to find the best and most comfortable one to play your arrangement in.
Learning to fingerstyle arrange songs takes time, patience and a lot practice so don’t expect to be brilliant at it overnight. Just keep arranging as much as possible and you’re arrangements will get better and better. Always be thinking “How can I make this arrangement more interesting?” and “How can I play it in a more comfortable way that sounds just as good, if not better?”
If you think like that and you practice arranging often, you could well become a jaw-droppingly good fingerstyle arranger.
Remember too that my course How to Arrange Songs for Fingerstyle Guitar is there for you if you want it.
Author: Chris Murrin
Chris Murrin is a British guitar teacher who has dedicated his adult life to helping students master the guitar. A few years ago, in 2018, he founded Six String Fingerpicking so that he could help experienced and budding guitarists the world over to realise their fingerpicking goals.