Creating Fingerstyle Guitar Arrangements :: Lesson 4

Creating arrangements of popular music presents some interesting challenges. The listening audience normally expects your instrumental version to be very similar to the original recording. Thus you have to include in your arrangement as much of the vocals and instrumentation of the recording that you can. Certainly a challenge, but normally within the realm of possibility.

In this lesson, Blue Bayou recorded by Linda Ronstadt in the mid 70's will be used. If you inspect the melody closely, you will find that is composed primarily of just four (4) notes. They key of A was chosen as the melody falls entirely on the upper three (3) strings and the bass on the lower three (3) strings, and as you will see, about 80% of the song can be played using just two chord forms.

Following the steps outlined in the previous lessons, an alternating bass arrangement was done. Listen to the sound clip and judge for yourself if it reminds you of the original recording.

As you listened to the sound clip, you heard the melody as expected, but the bass line was nothing near what you expected. What gives this particular song it's unique character is the bass vamp used throughout the song. The bass line is not four (4) notes played on beats 1, 2, 3, and 4, but consists of three (3) notes played on beats 1, 2-1/2, and 4. Thus the goal is to arrange the bass line, so the vamp is played whenever possible.

An interesting phenomenon is that if the vamp is included early in the song as often as possible, you condition the listening audience, and they will tend to hear it even when you don't play it.  So don't worry if it cannot be sustained in every measure. Below is the revised arrangement with the bass vamp in place. As you listen to the sound clip, you should now start to hear the essence of the original recording, and that is the ultimate goal.

For simplicity, in this lesson, no attempt was made to add any harmonization. The final arrangement starts with a single note melody, then harmonization is added with slight re-phrasing of the melody. There is a section where the harmony is played at a pitch above the melody, and the steel guitar solo is included. As you play the sound clip below, you will hear the bass vamp in almost every measure.

The tabs in TablEdit format and images are available for download:: BlueBayou.zip