Play Better Fingerstyle Blues, Part III: Arrange
Published: Tue, 10/26/21
Songwriter #1: These lyrics are positively epigrammatic!"
Songwriter #2: "What does that mean, exactly?"
Songwriter #1: "You know. Concise."
Songwriter #3: "Wouldn't the word 'concise' have been more epigrammatic in the first place, then?"
Songwriter #2: "What does that mean, exactly?"
Songwriter #1: "You know. Concise."
Songwriter #3: "Wouldn't the word 'concise' have been more epigrammatic in the first place, then?"
Nothing in the word department gets past this crew, that's for sure. So in inviting you to today's live stream, I feel I ought to say something about the word "arrange," which is potentially both a vague and an intimidating word to be throwing around this early in the morning.
In the general musical sense, if the song itself is the what, arranging is the how. If we sit down to play guitar together and you say, "What song are we playing?" I might say "Nobody's Fault But Mine." Now you know what song we're playing. You know the facts of that song's composition: it's got a particular chord progression with a particular melody. That tells you the eight bars we're going to be working with.
But if you say "How are we playing it?" I might say something like:
"Well, we'll vamp over the I chord for a while, then you'll come in with the melody. We'll play through that twice, and the second time, I'm going to play this descending bass line under what you're doing. You'll take the first solo, and go through the chord progression two times. Then we'll do those chords hits we worked out, one time through the progression, and after that I'll take my solo. We'll do the chord
hits together one more time, then go back to the melody. And finally, we'll repeat the last two bars of the turnaround three times, then end it."
Now you know what the arrangement is. We've created a bunch of different sections – an intro, a variation on the melody, a solo section, etc – and arranged them into a particular order. Hopefully that order of events creates a sense of development and direction, gradually moves to some kind of peak moment, then winds down to a conclusion.
If you play and sing, you can play the same guitar accompaniment more or less the same way for verse after verse, as the lyrics will provide much of the narrative momentum a song requires. But if you play instrumental blues tunes, arranging may the missing piece you've been needing to turn your eight, twelve or sixteen bar ideas into complete two- to three-minute songs.
In this morning's lesson, I'll show you a simple step-by-step process to turn "Nobody's Fault But Mine" from an eight-bar melody with steady bass accompaniment into a complete solo fingerstyle blues instrumental. Join me at the link below at 10:30am central, or use the same link to watch the replay whenever you have the time. I'll do my best to be concise:
Play Better Fingerstyle Blues, Part III: Arrange
10:30am central
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More soon,
David