I was very happy with the result of last weeks practice and how much better I know those chords now, so I decided I want to continue with the same strategy as last week, this week with the last frontier by Redgum. I grew up with this song so I know it very well and I have always thought that it carried emotional weight that would make it a nice campfire song, so I tried to arrange it this week to sound like that.
The original key contains B minor, which I thought I could learn just for this song but seeing as it isn’t a required chord I thought it better to transpose it down a tone and use a capo. This song now contains Bb Majors and F’s so I thought it was a good chance to practice these harder chords, and it also has C7 so I thought it was a good chance to learn that.
When I was learning this song I noticed the violin part did some nice embelishments in the original, and I tried to create some of my own playing only one note at a time that I could edit in after to make it sound more complete. I realised after I wrote these moving parts however that they all either played a note already being played by the chord or just played an open string so I decided to try play these with the chordal part. It took a while to get the coordination down but once I did I found it a very useful excersise in selectively strumming strings on the guitar whilst the others rang out from a previous chord.
Hamish Reeves Music 