Country Roads - Fingerstyle Guitar - With Free Tab
In this video I want to share with you my version of John Denver's classic song 'Country Roads'. This is a very famous piece of country music and I have done a fingerstyle guitar version of it with a slightly bluesy feel. The music is a fairly standard fingerstyle guitar piece incorporating a travis picking bass pattern.
In my version, I have put in a short single bar Intro played in the open position, then I play through the verse and then the chorus. Finally, I have put in a 4 bar outro section. The original song also has a bridge setion in it but I have not included this is my version. The reason for this is because, although the song isnt extremely difficult to play, it can be quite fidgety and tricky and keeping it to just the verse and chorus makes it more manageable to play.
The music is in the Key of D, it is in 4/4 time and is played on a guitar
in Open D Tuning.
Below are some tips to help you play this piece, and links to download the tab.
- Travis Picking - The music employs a travis picking pattern through most of it. However, Much of this travis picking takes place on adjacent strings 5 and 4. Now, although this isn't uncommon when you're doing the travis picking bass pattern on these strings it can be very easy to catch one of the open vibrating strings and get a ringing sound, this is more likely if, like me, you pick the bass notes with your thumb rather than a thumb pick. If you are finding you are getting a ringing noise when playing the bass notes, it may be worth trying to angle your hand differently towards the strings. If you move your hand to a more perpendicular position in relation to the strings, there may be less chance of you getting this ringing sound. Ultimately though, what you have to do is find a position that's comfortable for you to pick the strings and minimizes the amount of ringing you get.
- Finger Placement - To incorporate all the melody notes in the music, while still maintaining the underlying chords, requires a bit of stretching with your fretting hand. To make this easier, it is worth thinking about how you make the underlying chords and which fingers you used to fret the strings. Sometimes using the most obvious fingers won't allow for you to make the subsequent stretches. Ultimately, you will have to find the easiest and most comfortable playing positions that suit you. However, if you watch through the video at the end where I play it slower, you will see where I place my fingers on the fret board. I find this to be the best location for me to play these notes, so it may be worth watching this and looking at my finger placements and this might help you make these stretches.
- Additional Notes - The music has a lot of dead space in it, and what I mean by dead space is that there are quite a lot of bars, especially in the chorus, that don't have any melody notes in them. Now you could just play the bass notes through these bars, but it can make the music sound a bit hollow and flat. So what I have done is added some additional, intermittent notes in to help pad the music out and give it more interest. Now, none of these intermittent notes are particularly difficult to play, but adding any additional notes in the music will make it slightly trickier. If you are struggling with this piece, it may be worth leaving some of these intermittent notes out because they're not an essential part of the melody. Another thing you can do is just put your own intermittent notes in. I find the notes I've added sound good with the music and I find them easy to play, but there's nothing stopping you putting in some of your own additional notes that suit your playing style.
Neil
Comments
Post a Comment