These days I tend to play nylon stringed electric guitars, for chord melody guitar playing. I’ve grown more into nylon stringed guitars so they don’t tear my fingernails apart and I’m able to play chord melody guitar easily. I generally swap between pick style and finger-style within the same tune which is why I like the feel of nylon strings. Currently I’ve been using the “shark tooth” picks which allows me to play both plectrum and finger-style at any given moment. This wasn’t always so and for me, being self taught, took quite a few years to develop this technique so that changing from pick to fingers is now seamless. I’m sure that there are lots of electric guitar players playing chord melody guitar today that play this way. In the beginning I wanted to play like my early heroes however, after hearing John McLaughlin play for the first time changed everything I thought about how to play the electric guitar. He developed his own “guitar voice” and then kept changing his guitar voice over time. But there are a lot of players who don’t develop their own musical voice but just keep rehashing the “same old” “same old” stuff and probably will never change. I think that guitar players should take some form of formal or semi-formal lessons with a well structured step by step process, and well thought out system that covers all aspects of music. Not the teaser guitar lessons you get on You Tube which are so fragmented that its just a hit miss situation at best and will get you nowhere. Granted you might be able to play some tune in the end but to me that’s just more rehash with no focus on developing your own voice on guitar. Most guitar players only learn how to play little fragments of tunes. Maybe that’s cool with you but for me I needed more than the same old stuff. There sure are lots of electric guitar players who only know how to play bits of songs. Does this sound familiar? Some sort of riff or short solo here perhaps a rhythm pattern you learned off of you tube or a scale or mode here and there and maybe some odd facial expressions to boot. When you think about it, this is perhaps most common among electric guitar players. At least acoustic guitar players will know a song from start to finish but this is not always the case with electric guitar players A balanced approach to learning guitar is necessary. I started out some 40 years ago knowing two chords but because I was able to take lessons and learn from a well respected guitar master and teacher, I think I have developed my own voice in a balanced way. The standard things I had to learn were things like scale patterns, reading music, understanding keys, playing chord melody guitar arrangements and chord substitutions and the arrangements were generally jazz tunes and music with a boat load of chord changes in lots of different keys. All this stuff I learned was extremely essential (some people would consider it boring) but I’m sure that all this theory and all helped me get through this long time investment of guitar playing. For me the most valuable thing I could do playing guitar was creating solo guitar arrangements of tunes (as opposed to taking a solo in the middle of tune) this was the culmination of years of reading music and theory and scales etc. It allowed me to do what I wanted on guitar and create a mini orchestra with one instrument aka. chord melody guitar playing. I can now play in a band or just solo and keep everything fresh and interesting. Audiences will subconsciously make a decision on whether the song is OK or not depending on how the music starts. If the intro is not right on, the audience will tune it out. I developed a good sense of melody by sitting down and arranging tunes on guitar (in my case I can read music so this helps). How do we start arranging for chord melody guitar.

Dennis Playing Chord Melody Guitar

1. Find a tune that you are familiar with and pick out the melody on the first two strings of your guitar (horizontally). This may not always happen especially if the key of the tune is forcing you to play too high or too low on the neck.
2. Transposing the melody to another guitar friendly key will help this situation. The drawback to this is if your playing with other musicians who know the tune in the original key there may be some musical conflict going on there.
3. Add the bass notes on the 6th, 5th or 4th strings to the melody especially on the down beats like 1 and 3 then later on you can add more but for now keep it simple.
4. Fill in the middle voices on the inside set of strings depending on the chords of the song. Remember you don’t have to have a chord for every note of the melody but make sure you are defining the melody so the audience knows what tune you’re playing.
5. After you have the chords and melody down then try to add small in between notes to the melody by adding one or two notes here and there while maintaining the chords.
6. Then try to play the chords and perhaps some different voicings of the same chords (this might be a stretch for some folks). What you are doing is finding the same type of chords but with a different fingering and placement. For example: playing a G7 chord with the root on the 6^th string then playing a G7 chord with the root on the 4^th string. This changes the sound and may give you ideas about changing the melody to something else to create a variation.
7. Play the tune over again and make some kind of ending. Make sure that the ending sound like an ending it should sound obvious.

If you apply the above technique to a number of tunes, you’ll find your playing will become very strong. Your arrangements will become more interesting. Then if you find a gig at a restaurant you’ll have the option to play solo guitar and take another job. Leave me some comments..

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