Guitar Chord Melody - Chord Melody Arrangement

Undoubtably one of the finest ways to play your acoustic guitar is to use a chord melody approach. Playing chord melody on your guitar is when you play both chords and melody together at the same time.

Simple concept, yet it is one of the most challenging ways to play the acoustic guitar. Fortunately, if done right, you can be up and playing chord melody arrangements on your guitar in only a short amount of time. 

In this lesson we are going to create our own arrangement of Amazing Grace, using the chord melody approach on our guitar. We will build this in stages starting with . . . . . 

The Melody

Often, anything that sounds complicated to you on the guitar is really just a bunch of simple things being played together. So when starting a chord melody guitar arrangement we need to look at each part separately first. 

Beginning at the end (ie. learning chord melody arrangements as a whole), only leads to frustration. Try playing the last example in this lesson now, and you’ll see what I mean :)

The melody is a good place to start, so here it is:

The above melody for our arrangement is very simple, however learn it well because we will be adding to it very shortly.

The Bass

Next we will create a bass part for our guitar chord melody:

The above bass line is made up of the root notes of each chord. Very simple, but when we add the melody and bass parts together below, our chord melody arrangement starts to take shape:

Chords

This in itself sounds complete, and you could leave it at that and have a very nice arrangement of Amazing Grace under your fingers. However, I did say chord melody arrangement, so lets fill it out a little more by adding notes on the first beat of each bar to create a chord:

Notice that in our arrangement above, I have not used the full chord. This is because I want to keep the melody note as the highest note in each chord. This will help your melody stand out from the other parts. 

It also lets the piece breathe a little by leaving space and not cluttering it with too many notes. I have highlighted the melody note in red so that you don’t lose sight of it. 

Again, you could leave it here. You now have a very nice chord melody guitar arrangement of Amazing Grace. 

But, I want to show you one last step you can do.

Picking Out The Notes Of Each Chord 

To really fill out our arrangement of Amazing grace, you can pick out the notes of each chord. This is commonly known as arpeggiating the chords. Check it out:

Again, I have highlighted the melody notes in red. It is important to know exactly where these notes are. This is so that you can emphasize them and maybe play them a little louder to help them stand out.

Thats it!

You now have a really nice chord melody arrangement that you can play on your guitar of Amazing Grace. 

Jumping in on the very last example in this lesson would have proven difficult if you are new to playing chord melody stuff on your guitar. However, by breaking it down in just a few simple steps, you can see how easy it is to build chord melody arrangements on your guitar.

Take a melody that you know well, and follow the steps we have in this lesson on chord melody to come up with your own arrangement. It just takes a little practice. The more you do it, the easier it will get.

Here are some great chord melody players worth checking out if you are keen to take this great way of playing your acoustic guitar further.

• Chet Atkins
• Tommy Emmanuel
• Martin Taylor
• Lenny Breau

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