7 Crippling Mistakes To Avoid When Creating And Playing Chord/Melody Arrangements On Guitar - Part 2

by Simon Candy

In part 1 of this article lesson, I laid out 3 key mistakes guitar players make when creating chord/melody arrangements.

By avoiding these common mistakes, playing and creating chord/melody arrangements becomes so much easier to do, even if you consider yourself to have only basic playing skills in this area of guitar.

In part 2, I am going to present a further 4 critical mistakes made when attempting to play the chords and melody to a tune at the same time on one guitar. By avoiding these common mistakes, playing and creating chord/melody arrangements becomes so much easier to do, even if you consider yourself to have only basic playing skills in this area of guitar.

4. Not Considering The Key When Creating Your Arrangement

As a general rule, you want the melody of the tune you are arranging to fall on the top 2 or 3 strings of your guitar. If the melody falls on the lower 3 strings it will get in the way of the bass and chords that are harmonising it.

Depending on the tune, there will be a select group of keys that it will work best in. Don’t simply choose one by default just because it may be a key you are more familiar with.

Certain keys may offer more favourable open chord shapes to use compared to others. It could be that you favour the mellowness of the melody in one key, or perhaps the range of the melody (from the highest to lowest note) suits the guitar better in one key over another.

How To Avoid This Mistake:

• Before creating your arrangement, take the time to determine which key fits the melody best on the guitar. This will save you headaches later on.

• Find the lowest note of the melody and the highest note of the melody and make sure they can all be played on the top 2/3 strings of the guitar within a suitable range/position. There can be a note or two that doesn’t fall on these strings, but the vast majority of the melody must. 

5. Not Having Any Creative Ways To Harmonise The Melody

The whole point of creating chord/melody pieces is to develop ways of playing the chords and melody of a tune on one guitar simultaneously, much like a pianist might go about arranging/playing a piece.

However often the melody is treated as an afterthought, and even if everything is technically correct, it can still sound dull and uninteresting. You need to develop ways to express the melody with depth, emotion, and sophistication.

How To Avoid This Mistake:

• Adding an alternate bass/travis picking approach to your arrangements can result in a more rhythmic and syncopated melody line as a kind of flow on effect.

• Playing a melody line using harp harmonics will add a whole new dimension to your chord/melody piece, not too mention seriously impress anyone who hears you play them.

• Adding the droning of open strings to your melody when you are NOT in the open position, will bring another unique sound to your arrangement.

• Punctuating the space between the melody phrases of the tune with chords, as oppose to playing chord and melody at the exact same time, gives you more room/space to express the melody using legato, bends, slides.

• You can also add your own unique touch by varying the melody. Be careful though, you want to stay true to the melody if/when doing this.

Check out the video below to learn a very unique way of harmonising melody using quartal harmony:

6. Not Looking At What Has Come Before To Gain Insights, Ideas, And Inspiration

It is common for guitar players to purposely avoid looking at what others have done before them, in an attempt to not end up being a clone of someone else with their chosen style/genre. This is flawed logic to say the least.

By observing, studying, and analyzing the techniques of other musicians in chord/melody playing, you can improve your own creativity by gaining inspiration from their ideas and incorporating them into your own unique arrangements.

You will not find a guitar great out there who has not been influenced heavily by others who have come before them.

How To Avoid This Mistake:

• Discover different approaches to arranging and harmonizing melodies, by learning a variety of existing chord/melody arrangements from different players. By doing so, you'll find many creative ways to approach your guitar playing and be more inspired than ever before!

7. Beginning At The End Instead Of The Beginning

Creating a chord/melody arrangement of a tune by trying to do everything at once, that is starting with the finished product, does not work. The same is true when learning exisiting chord/melody arrangements on your guitar.

This is because a completed chord/melody arrangement can look very complicated. However, if you know how to break an arrangement down, it reveals its structure and simplicity, and will also give you a great insight into how to build your own arrangements.

How To Avoid This Mistake:

• Divide your arrangement into 3 parts (bass, harmony, melody) and develop each part in isolation before putting them together

For a detailed breakdown of how to go about dong this checkout the video below where I go through the process if creating a chord/melody arrangement of a tune step by step:

Check out the 5 easy steps to creating your own chord melody arrangements on guitar ebook/audio, to see and hear concepts and approaches covered in this article, applied to an actual song.