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Here is my fingerstyle arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner, the American national anthem ... if you're American, this will obviously mean a whole lot more to you than the rest of us, but no matter where you come from, it sure is a beautiful piece of music. I saw a post here yesterday asking about it, so I figured it would make a good lesson. I found a couple of versions online and pieced this almost Baroque version together. It's by no means easy (ask Clancy who had to listen to me assembling it and practicing it all last evening) and I apologize to the beginners here! Maybe I'll try and come up with a simple arrangement and make a whole new lesson of it for beginners.
I did it in G ... it's such a good key for fingerstyle, what with all the open strings that keep coming into play.
You'll see in the movie (apologies for the distortion in the audio ... the mic was running a little hot
) that the
left hand does quite a bit of travelling ... I tried to keep all the moves compact but the melody uses such wide intervals that I had no choice. It's all good practice! Let your arm and hand get to know the exact distances of those jumps up the fretboard.
I drop a couple of sections down an octave to try and keep it in the open chords region of the fretbaord. You'll hear where.
This arrangement is a classic example of knitting melody line, bass line and chord fragments together into one seamless piece. Being a national anthem, quite a bit of work has gone into arranging it over the decades (centuries?) and the versions I heard were both very ornate and complex. I stripped them right back to the bare essentials, keeping this arrangement quite open and airy, very classical sounding... in fact in some places sounds almost like a lute.
I'll leave the Roman numeral progression out this week ... there are so many changes and suggestions of chords that it would be more confusing than helpful, but the main skeleton of its structure is firmly anchored to the I-IV-V chords (as always) and the deviations from the key are the usual majorizing of the ii chord ... a hint of a majorized iii . The chords indicated in the movie are pretty much what's going on, just a little simplified here and there. One thing you won't hear is any hint of the Blues ... not a flat 3 in sight.
You'll hear that I get trickier and trickier as I near the end ... I couldn't resist those busy bass lines. They're a ball to play once you learn them, and believe me, I worked on them for quite a while, nice and slowly, until they became engrained in my muscle memory.
The Tab is accurate, sorry about all the triplet symbols and other clutter ... I'm sure there must be a better way of notating it, but I don't know it! Try and ignore all the fly specks. You'll see that I didn't put any chord diagrams near the end. That's because I wasn't really working around any shapes for most of those bits.
The movie shows the basic hand positions ... the finger picking is a little blurred but it's a long movie and I had to compress the living daylights out of it to make it manageable.
Have fun with it, and if you're American, remember to take your hat off and stand up when playing it!
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