How To: Arrange chords on an acoustic solo fingerstyle guitar

If you need to know how to make an arrangement on an acoustic solo fingerstyle guitar, you've come to the right video tutorials. This three-part instructional guitar lesson will show you want you need to know about arranging.

Find the melody in the song or use sheet music or tablature. The melody is the most important thing.

Now find the bass, then make chords of them (if you play from sheet music or tablature you already have it in front of you). When you don't have sheet music or tabs, it might be useful to write the melody down, with the chords above them. Now you have a good summary of what's going on and when it's happening. Another wise thing to do is just play the chords and sing the melody so you have a good feel of what's going on when the chords are changing.

Search for a way that the two melt together. For this part it is important you know some fingertstyle patterns. Sometimes the melody is already in the chord so you have to put an accent on the desired note. The more patterns, scales and chords you can find on the neck of your guitar the more you're gonna benefit from it.

If you don't like the sound of the key the song is in (to low or to high) you can use a capo. Otherwise you can transpose the tune to a different key. For example, when a song is in A and the first 3 chords are Bmin7- E 7- Amaj7 and you like the sound when it's in G better, it is gonna be: Amin7- D7- Gmaj 7. Another reason for transposing is that you are more familiar with playing in a certain key. So you might know your way a bit better around the chords, the melody and other tricks.

When necessary, detune your guitar to make your playing a bit easier. Always search for a string that's close to the note you're searching for. It's also possible to detune your guitar later on.

To give your arrangement more live and excitement, adding special techniques is a nice thing to do. Some common techniques are: hammer ons, pull offs, slides, vibrato, harmonics, and be