I was going down the rabbit hole that is youtube this week, in my attempts to find music to listen to, and I stumbled accross this recording of hearts on fire by Passenger, sung with Ed Sheeran.
I’ve always liked the song when it is sung by only passenger but I forgot about it for years, until I saw this and it made me want to play it for my song this week. It is very repetative which should make learning the new Cadd9 chord required by the piece fairly straightforward.
After I wrote the beginning of this post, I started to learn the song and it turns out the original is transposed down a semitone, and I wanted to stay true to the original, so I had 3 options. Option 1, add a capo on fret 11 which is a fairly bad option as it would be way to high a capo and my hands would have to wrap around the body of the guitar. Option 2 is to place a capo on fret 6 and play in C instead of G, which would be a good option if I didn’t want to learn Cadd9 (the substitute would be Fadd9 and I like the sound of Cadd9 much more and it would be more common with most songs). Option 3 is to tune all the strings down a semitone and play what I was already going to (the chords from the duet not the original) and seeing as 1 semitone isn’t that much, and it’s not something I would normally do I figured I would go with option 3. I also thought it would be interesting to see if the timbre of the guitar would be altered from it being detuned slightly lower.
Hamish Reeves Music 