One of the things you can do on the guitar that sets it apart from many other instruments is that you can play multiple rhythms and melodies at the same time. This allows us to create some pretty awesome arrangements.
So in this video, we’re going to take you behind-the-scenes and show you how Nate goes about transforming “Yesterday” by The Beatles into a solo fingerstyle piece. To start, we’ll listen through the song and find the chords.
Once we’re certain that we know the chords, we’ll plug everything into Guitar Pro and create a bass line following the chords. To do this, we just need to take the root note and the 5th (in most cases) of each chord and alternate them back and forth using eighth notes.
Now that we have a bass line, we’ll write out the melody on the higher strings. We need to make sure that the notes are in the best locations so we can reach them with our fretting hand while still fretting our bass notes.
From here, it’s all about meshing them together and practicing. And then more practicing. It’ll take some time to really get all this coordination down and play the song at full speed. You can learn this song and get the tabs for this arrangement right here: “Yesterday” Tabs
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