A little tribute Stephen Sondheim who passed away last week.
Like the original, the arrangement is sparse. Which lets the melody shine all the more. It also makes it fairly simple to play. There’s a stretch with the pinkie finger in bars 13 and 29. But otherwise not much to trip you up.
RHCP’s I Could Have Lied was written by Anthony Kiedis after Sinead O’Connor broke up with him. Who would have thought that relationship wouldn’t last?
Blood Sugar Sex Magik is packed with great riffs and this one is no exception. It works nicely on the uke too. Well worth learning it even if you’re not learning the whole song.
The intro and the verse are all played with thumb and two finger picking. With the exception of the rapid notes on the E-string, 3rd fret in bar 10 where I’m using alternate picking to keep up the speed. The part I struggled with here is the pull-off between bars 10 and 11. It involves holding a note on the C-string while pulling off on the A-string. For an easier version, you can skip the note on the C-string.
The chorus is fairly straightforward with most of it being chord strums apart from the riff.
The solo uses a few elements from the original. But I’ve changed it up to suit my own playing and I suggest you do the same.
Andy Griffith never made it to this side of the Atlantic, but I was still very familiar with the Andy Griffith Show theme tune somehow.
The bouncy tune and chord stabs make this one a lot of fun to play. Although it’s tricky to play up to speed. Definitely one to play very slowly until you’ve got it under your fingers.
Warren Zevon’s Keep Me in Your Heart is one of the emotional songs I know of. It was the final track on his final album The Wind released shortly before his death. It was used recently by Jimmy Carr to pay tribute to Sean Lock.
It’s a straight-forward one to play. Nothing too tricky and one finger per string picking all the way through.
Helpfully, Genius has a video of Redbone producer Ludwig Göransson breaking down all the parts in the song. Including a chord chart and sheet music. As well as being useful for learning the song, it’s interesting to see how the song grew. Well worth a watch.
One of the things he mentions in the video is the oddity of an extra bar in the second pre-chorus. To avoid making the tab unnecessarily long, I’ve tabbed the alternative bars next to each other. So first time around you play just bar 22 then skip to the chorus. And second time, you skip bar 22 and play bars 23 and 24 instead.
The picking in this is one-finger-per-string right up until the solo where I switch to strumming.
Shamefully, I’ve never seen an episode of Buffy. I couldn’t even have hummed the theme tune before it was requested on the Patreon. Even so, it’s such a 90s-fest it gave me nostalgia.
And it’s dead simple. It’s mostly bashing out chords with a few single notes here and there.
Zombie has had a strange journey from song about the troubles in Northern Ireland to a halloween staple. A change that some people might be happy to see. I remember the band Therapy? (who, unlike The Cranberries, are from Northern Ireland) attacking the song for its over-the-top imagery.
The chords for this arrangement are Em – C – G – D all the way through. Which is the same as the original (although the original is tuned slightly sharp).
The trickiest bit is recreating the vocal crack she does in the chorus in bar 28 then in bars 32-34. You can duplicate the vocal effect by stopping the strings ringing right after the hammer-on.
The solo is made up mostly of double stops on the E- and A-strings. That does create a few tricky sections (like 46) bit is more straightforward than most solos.
Following on from I Will Always Love You with the song Dolly wrote on the same day. I don’t know how it’s possible to write two all-time classics in one day.
The arrangement starts out with a very basic version of the chorus. You could play the verse in this style and create a nice arrangement.
Next is an approximation of the intro riff from the original. The syncopated rhythm is tricky to get the hang of. Apparently, even the session musicians had trouble getting it down. I’ve made a close up video for just this section. If you want to play along to the original, you’ll have to tune down half a step to Gb B Eb Ab.
The verse and chorus are based on an alternating thumb picking pattern (moving between the C and g-strings) like the original. Unfortunately, the melody sometimes strays onto the C-string which complicates matters. I found it a little tricky to switch in and out of the alternating pattern. But after starting super-low and gradually increasing the speed, it started to feel almost on autopilot after a while.
I Will Always Love You is one of those songs where a cover version has completely obliterated the original. But Dolly’s version is still my favourite. Specifically, the 70s countrified version rather than the syrupy 80s version. So I used that one as the basis for this arrangement. Although some of the phrasing might be closer to the Whitney Houston version.
The intro is the trickiest part of the arrangement with a couple of bends and a bar of 2/4 to navigate.
The arrangement uses a lot of arpeggios. So you really need to emphasise the melody notes so it doesn’t just become a mush. But you can rely on most people being familiar with the melody, so they’ll do some of the work for you.
You do need to prepare a bit for the high vocal trills in bars 15 and 19. There are open strings either side of those to give you a bit more time to move.
Here’s my take on Jack Black and Kyle Gass’s lewd ode to soft loving. But if you don’t tell anyone what the title is, it functions nicely as a pleasant tune. The jump up the neck at the start of the chorus (bars 19 and 20) is particularly sweet.
And there are a few jumps up the neck to deal with. But the trickiest part is the rapid pull-on and hammer-on section in bar 26. If you struggling with that, you can replace the whole 10-12-10-8 with the A-string, 10th fret.