Playing A Song Vs. Arranging A Song

If you play guitar, at some point someone has come up to you and said something like, "Oh, you play guitar? Can you play me a song?"

At which point a lot of us do one of 2 things: A) We play them some riff to a song we know or B) We try to be cool and say something like, "I doubt I know any songs that you'd know..." or otherwise do whatever we can to get out of it.

In either event, the end result is the same... and it's not pretty.

That's because the problem is that when someone asks for a song, they want to hear something that they recognize, and that sounds like a whole song... not just the guitar part!When you realize that, a whole bunch of new questions pop up -

1. What constitutes a "real" song anyway?
2. It's just me, how could I play all the different parts of a song (drums, bass, keyboards maybe, singing...)
3. What parts of the song are important enough that I need to play them?

First, let's looks at what makes a "real song" anyway... and let's get this out of the way first - you cannot copyright a chord progression.

So just because you wrote some chords that sound good together, that's not a song... at least not in the eyes of the US copyright office, and your listeners won't be too enthralled either.

Without a melody, you don't have a song... period.

So what covers the melody? Usually it's the singer. Do you sing? No? Welcome to elevator music

Elevator music is useful because it's unobtrusive. The melody is there, people can hum along with it, but there are no words to distract the listener from whatever they are really doing at the moment.

Honestly, if you play only a melody, you'll get more people recognize what you do that if you strum the chords to a song. Who knows the changes to Happy Birthday? Hardly anyone, but if you play the melody people know it in an instant.

So unless you sing, in which case your guitar playing is the accompaniment, you have the daunting task of arranging the song for guitar.

What that means is that you somehow have to play the chords, imply some rhythm, and play the melody - all at the same time.

Sound like a challenge? It is... it's a big challenge. That's why a lot of people don't do it.

Now this isn't really the time or place to get into how to arrange a song... but my purpose here is to demonstrate that playing a song (or playing what the guitar player on the recording played) isn't the same as arranging a song so that it can be played without other instruments in such a way that people you play for are going to recognize and appreciate it.

So as you're learning, listen for songs that you already know and like that you think will adapt well to playing by yourself without other instruments. All you need is a few in your back pocket to handle that ever present question from friends and family...

By the way, here's a somewhat popular arrangement done on a classical guitar. This sort of thing is very common in classical guitar because classical players don't usually ever plan on playing in a band. But you can do the same thing on an electric or steel stringed acoustic guitar.