Writing Guitar Arrangements

For the past few months, I’ve greatly expanded my knowledge of music theory. In addition to now having Guitar Pro, I have a decent idea on how to arrange songs for the guitar.

For me, I make fingerstyle guitar arrangements which means playing the melody, bass line, and harmony on one guitar. From what I’ve been taught I’ll usually figure out the time signature, key, and tempo first. There isn’t really a particular order, it’s just whichever is easiest to find first. Depending on the song, it’s possible to just do a simple Google for piano sheets to get all that information. Most of the time, there will be piano sheets for popular songs, but sometimes there might not be any. Figuring out the time signature and tempo is easy to find just by listening to the song. However, my ability to identify chords isn’t that great, so usually, I just try to figure out the most played chord, or the scale that the melody fits into.

After figuring out those three things, I can get started on notating in Guitar Pro. I like to start with writing out the melody, then the bass line, then fill the in-betweens with harmony. Occasionally some songs have strange rhythms for the melody, but most of the time I can figure it out. For the bass, I like to just put the root note of the chord on the beat of a chord change. Later, I would decide if I want to change the bass line or leave it as one note. For harmony, I usually play the notes of the chord that’s currently in use whenever there’s space to be filled in.

Some things that I’ve found difficult throughout this process would definitely be chord identification, especially with non-open chords. The different places to play the chords in relation to where the melody is being played is also a factor.

There are still things I haven’t really gone into yet such as harmonics, percussion with the guitar, and different tunings. However, they are definitely things I’d like to utilize in my arrangments to make them more interesting than what I have right now.

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