Video Transcript
First of all a big hug to all of you in these uncertain times.Today I wish today to share with you a way of playing the guitar that makes me smile. Music is the love of my life and I simply just adore experimenting with the guitar.
Guitar arrangements with seven individual guitar parts
Listen to one of my latest guitar arrangements where I play its melody with 7 individual guitar parts.This is the introduction of my latest release that you can hear on Spotify or on my Guitar youtube channel called: A Gentle Touch.
I have 3 guitars playing the melody in 3 different octaves, and the other 4 harmonise horizontally the melody.
Listen to how the feel changes as I add guitars, the melody with one guitar, with the second guitar in octaves, with the third guitar in another octave, with the top melody harmonised, and the same harmony played octave lower.
This is the power of arranging, a craft to learn to help us have the most possible fun in our playing.
What do you need to know?
- You need to have a solid understanding of how to create diatonic triads chords in closed and open positions, and secondary dominants.
- You need to understand which note of the melody to harmonise with the chords of the bar, and what harmony can be used to harmonise the melodic notes that are not of the chords.
- You need to make sure each line horizontally sounds good on its own, and how to adjust the vertical structures to make the flow of the lines more musical.
- When you double the harmony you need to know, depending on the impact of your voicing, what melodic notes to harmonise, as it can be the middle harmony, or the high melody.
- And you will need to understand how to play the part in a manner that allows the main melody to project, and the other six, even though they are actually matching the rhythm of the top melody, to be more in the background.
The Craft of Guitar Arranging
All of this knowledge takes time to learn. Arranging is not a craft that you can learn on your own. You need someone to teach you the craft as you are organising what a group of individual musicians will have to do and you have to think like those musicians do with their instrument.
