Using chords to create music: how to strum, pick, ornament and express chords to play expressive, creative and unique guitar parts.
This material will allow you develop your own characterful style for creating instrumental music or, to sound great accompanying yourself singing. It will develop your accuracy with picking different strings in the right hand, and in moving between chords and fills. Often the smallest adjustments are enough to really elevate how a progression with open chords sounds. When you’re familiar with this material, you’ll never run out of ideas as to how to make your guitar play sound musical and dynamic, and you’ll create guitar parts no-one else has played – this is part of discovering your style as a guitarist.
The first step below is the G Major Arranging Elements. You’ll see as we go through the different chords that some elements will be fairly similar for different chords.
After playing the G elements as shown, go through the on and offbeat examples that will really train your accuracy and technique for these elements.
We’ll then work through the elements as they apply to other chords and you’ll have plenty of opportunity to be creative with them.
The G Etude is an example of how some of the arranging elements can be combined into an arrangement of a 12 bar blues. There are one or two additional fills, but it is based on the idea of combining different elements in terms of strums, picking and fills.
To choose your own progressions, review the material from in The Chord Train PDF.
PDFS for Arranging in the materials tab
22 July 2022: Blues arranging pack in materials tab.
