Learn This Easy Strategy For Arranging Songs In A Fingerpicking Style On Your Guitar - Part 1

Today I am going to share with you part of a strategy I use to create fingerpicking arrangements of songs on my guitar. I am talking about the kind of arrangements where you play the bass, harmony, and melody parts all at one time, on one guitar.

This style of playing is more in line with how a pianist would play a piano, and sounds truly amazing when all parts of the song you are arranging are working together!


As great as these fingerpicking arrangements sound, they can appear to be very challenging to create yourself, and of course play. This is true if you approach this kind of guitar playing like most people do, that is without any real strategy or method in place.

This is how I first tried creating my own fingerpicking arrangements on guitar, and I failed dismally at it. All I seemed to succeed in doing was get really frustrated, believing it was beyond my ability to create my own arrangements of songs on guitar in a fingerpicking style.

Through sheer persistence, and some help from various resources over the years, I was able to nut out a strategy for creating my own arrangements that I could apply to any song I liked.

Today I am going to share part of this with you. Creating your own fingerpicking arrangements does not have to be hard. It should be fun and exciting!

In part 2 of this article, I will extend on the arrangement to show one of many possibilities you can do once you have the foundation of your tune in place.

For now, let’s get started doing exactly that!

Watch the video below for detailed demonstrations and explanations covered in this article.

Fingerpicking Arrangement Video Lesson

The Layers Of A Fingerpicking Guitar Arrangement

There are really only 3 main layers to any song. They are:

• Melody
• Harmony
• Bass

In a band you typically have the vocal taking care of the melody most of the time.

The guitar and perhaps keyboard/piano essentially take care of the harmony, and the bass, well it takes care of the bass believe it or not :)

Think of a choir.

There are the soprano voices taking care of the melody, the alto and tenor harmonising, and the baritones providing the bass.

You need to think in the same way when creating fingerpicking arrangements of songs on your guitar. That is, you need to break the song down into these areas and work on them individually before bringing them together to create your arrangement. Trying to do everything at once is a surefire way to fail miserably and give up in frustration. I know, I’ve been there.

So let me take you through this process with an tune called “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad”

Step 1: Fingerpicking Guitar Arrangement - Chords

The first step is to learn the chords to your tune. When I say learn, I mean memorise, and be able to play them in at least the open position on you guitar.

Here are the chords to our tune “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad”

Working On The Railroad Chords

Step 2: Fingerpicking Guitar Arrangement - Melody

Next, you need to learn the melody. Here I will place the melody to our tune in the open position:

Working On The Railroad Melody

Step 3: Fingerpicking Guitar Arrangement - Chords And Melody

Once you have established the chords and melody, it’s time to put them together. Watch the video that accompanies this article for a demonstration and explanation of how to do this:

Working On The Railroad Melody And Chords Together

Step 4: Fingerpicking Guitar Arrangement - Fleshing Things Out

What you have to this point in time sounds pretty good. However, you can make it sound even better and more musical and complete by fleshing things out a little.

Here is an example of this with our tune:

Working On The Railroad Arrangement

In the arrangement above, I have broken up the chords and melody to sound a little more musical and less exercise like. In bars 8, 9, 11, and 12, I have also arpeggiated some of the chords to flesh things out a little, and bring some variety to our arrangement.

To this point in time you have a really cool and complete sounding fingerpicking arrangement of “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad”.

However there is so much more we can do!

What you have done today, provides you with a great foundation from which to launch into some really cool ways in which to create fingerpicking arrangements on your guitar.

In part 2 of this lesson, I am going to introduce you to one particular fingerpicking technique that will take our arrangement in a whole new direction.

Better yet, combining what you have done in todays lesson, with what I will show you in part 2, will provide you with a more sophisticated, full, and complete sounding fingerpicking guitar arrangement.

Learn these strategies for creating and playing instrumental fingerpicking versions of songs on your guitar