Welch, Gillian - Orphan Girl Chord Melody Solo Tablature - Guitar Pro
Guitar Pro is tablature playback and writing software. Its most useful feature for guitar students is being able to hear what your tablature should sound like. There are tons of Guitar Pro files for songs available on UltimateGuitar.com. Guitar Pro is an excellent tool and well worth the $70.
Well, here we are at your final challenge in this course. I hope you're excited, I'm excited. I'm going to teach you how to play a legitimate, great sounding chord-melody finger style solo that you can play during the instrumental sections of "Orphan Girl". This is what it sounds like.
So to learn the solo, you're going to be putting together all the skills that I've been teaching you in this part of the course. You're going to be using Travis vision to decipher your Travis picked tablature. You're going to be working on finger and thumb independence, of course. You'll be syncopating your melody notes now. And you'll also be using finger style friendly guitar chords and throwing in smooth moves here and there. So you're putting all these skills together now.
And what do you get out of it? Because it's going to take a lot of work. There better be a big payoff, right? So for one thing, you're going to have a fantastic song now in your repertoire, "Orphan Girl", you'll be able to finger pick it and sing it. And now you've got the sweet chord-melody solo to throw in the middle of it. It's going to sound awesome. But even more importantly, you will have internalized these skills I've been teaching you that will allow you to go on and learn other chord-melody, finger style songs.
Now we'll be using the same strategy to learn this solo that we used for "You Are My Sunshine", where we learn the alternating bass part and melody part that is the thumb part and the finger part separately, at first. And once we've learned those, then we put them together, going measure by measure. All right, let's get started.
OK, so let's start with the alternating bass part of the solo. This is going to be the thumb part--the chord part in chord-melody. And so unsurprisingly, not only are you going to be training what your thumb is doing, you're also going to be more or less mapping out how you're going to grab your chord shapes during the solo. Let me just demonstrate for you what it sounds like. It'll sound a lot like when you learn just the picking pattern that you sing over earlier on in this course, but there are going to be a few tweaks. You might notice me using some slightly different fingerings here, so there'll be some new material here. OK, so here's what it sounds like. I'm going to skip the pickup the skip the first measure since it makes it sound a little off balance. Otherwise, here we go.
[Transcript for teaching portion is unavailable]
So like I said, you're going to need to go through this solo measure by measure. At first, learn each measure individually and get to where you can play it in rhythm at a slow tempo. Then start stitching the measures together, try two measures at a time and then try doing a whole line of the tablature in one go. And once you've been able to stitch all the measures together and can play the whole solo at a slow tempo without pausing, then you can graduate to playing along with the slow practice track that you'll see next in the course. And then finally, you could play along with the performance track, which is the same as this little practice track. It's just up to tempo, which I think is about 110 beats per minute. And then once you can play along with that performance track smoothly, then you can insert it in your song.
You can see in the chord chart, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have two instrumental sections in their recording of the song. I probably wouldn't play the same solo twice in a song. It usually doesn't do well to just exactly replicate an instrumental part more than once in a song. At least a long instrumental part like that. A short riff is another story, but I would probably do it during the second instrumental section. I think if I had to choose one, I think that's where I would put it.......more toward the end of the song to give people a little variety before you sing the last verse of the song. All right. Good luck working on this difficult project. I know it's a lot of work, but oh, the rewards are so great. So good luck and enjoy.
How's it going?
Are you loving the lesson? Confused? Have a suggestion? I'd love to hear from you.
