[Kirk Lorange]

Flash Player upgrade required The downloadable versions of these lessons come with high resolution movies with the Virtual Animated Fretboard and extra files to make learning easier. Click here to see what's included with this lesson.

This is probably Johann Sebastien Bach's most famous piece. I learned a fingerstyle arrangement somewhere around the mid 1960's and it must have been by ear as I didn't read notation and tab was unheard of. I did see myself becoming a classical guitarist back then and I had quite a good record collection, but I can't remember who I would have listened to to learn it. When I thought of the piece the other day I had a quick stab at it and to my surprise, my fingers remembered! Well, a lot of it, but I did have a listen to few other versions to get the nuances right. It really is a beautiful piece and I tried to strip it all back to just two lines -- melody and bass -- for this lesson. I hope I did it justice.

It's in G, of course. As always, G came through as the best key to keep the fingering compact and diminish the need to move up and down the fingerboard too much. That and the fact that when I did learn it all those years ago, it was in G.

This is not for beginners, as I'm sure you've already deduced, but even if you have just a little finger style experience, it's not all that difficult. As I said before, it is just two lines interweaving, so no big complex chord formations come into play. The counterpoint gets a little tricky, the way the bass line follows a different timing pattern from the melody line, but that's what's so fun about playing it. Getting those fingers to obey is what it's all about, obey, then remember, remember so well you can forget them.

The downloadable lesson has a slowed down movie, and I've included right and left hand fingerings in the tab this time. I've had a few requests and it does get a little tricky seeing what finger's doing what in the movies.

As always, the chord names are there just to let you know what they are. They're not actually being played in this rendition, but if your friend wanted to strum chords behind your picking, those are the ones to strum.

For anyone interested in the Roman numerals, you'll quickly see that this really is a I-IV-V tune. There's just that one little Am (vi) and Em/C# (just one way of naming that chord) that intrudes, but everything else is strictly "primary chords". And isn't it amazing how complex sounding that structure can become when JS Bach is the composer. This truly is a masterpiece of composition.

You can hear part two come in at the end where I fade out. I'll do that as the next lesson.

I've done the tab as 3/4 ... it's probably more like 6/8, but it doesn't affect the tab in any way. Also, you hear me count 1-2-3-4 ... that's two bars of 6/8. I should have counted 123223323423, but that sounds too confusing.

Have fun with this one ... like I say, unless you just started fingerstyling, as tricky as this one sounds, it's not all that difficult. Consider it a challenge and remember that you can practice as slowly as you wish. The tempo I chose is random. Some of the versions I listened to are extremely slow.

Click here for Part 2.

The downloadable version of this lesson now includes part 1 and part 2 and contains four high resolution movies, tab with right and left hand fingerings, midi files, GuitarPro files, Mp3s and notation.