A while back I posted a solo guitar arrangement of Happy Birthday.

I’ve since received a few requests for an easier accompaniment part suitable for basic strumming so here’s the version I teach my beginning/intermediate students. It’s in D major, uses only first-position chords, features a basic bass/chord strumming pattern, and best of all – it sounds really good! The optional introduction simply places the final few bars of the melody atop the chords and will help you set up the tempo and key for the big sing-along. Please leave a comment below if you enjoy the arrangement.

Happy Birthday Accompaniment for Guitar PDF

Looking for a solo fingerstyle guitar arrangement?
Try Happy Birthday for Solo Fingerstyle Guitar!

My internet buddy Rob Bourassa has a lot of very helpful information in his collection of over 200 YouTube videos. Rob’s method of approaching the instrument is unique and addresses some important skills that are usually missed by conventional teaching methods. I’ve been enjoying working through his material and finding ways to incorporate his ideas into my own teaching. Of particular interest are his well-organized Major Scale Primer and Play By Ear series. The material may seem basic at first, but I promise that mastering the concepts presented in these series of videos will give you some mad skills, so check ‘em out!

Swing Cello and Guitar Mike Karoub & Rob Bourassa

Jazz Guitar Etudes by Greg Fishman contains 12 jazz etudes and a CD with three practice tracks for each piece: one with the etude played on guitar, another with the etude played on tenor sax, and another with only a rhythm section. The book sells for $19.95.

Jazz Guitar Etudes is the first of two books I’m going to be reviewing that is NOT written by a guitarist. It turns out that Jazz Guitar Etudes was originally written by Chicago-based saxophonist Greg Fishman as a collection of saxophone etudes that has recently been adapted for guitar. Fortunately for us guitarists, Fishman did not simply transpose his sax studies for C instruments and leave it at that. Instead, he brought a guitarist on board. The guitar edition relies heavily on contributions from guitarist Mike Allemana who provides guitar tablature and relevant ideas of fingering and articulation options. The book also contains detailed notes from both Fishman and Allemana on how intermediate, advanced, and professional level students can use the etudes to further their improvisational skills.

Beyond these few pages of text the book gets right down to business with 12 etudes based on a variety of familiar chord progressions including blues, rhythm changes, and the changes to standard tunes such as “Alone Together”, “Body and Soul”, and “Have You Met Miss Jones”. The melodic lines in each etude are fantastic examples of classic bebop phrasing. Fishman makes the etudes thematic to a point, but doesn’t go so far as to make them sound like sound like tunes so much as really well-constructed solos that are hip and fun without ever straying from the underlying harmonies. There was obviously enough thought put into each etude that you could do an analysis of the material identifying common elements in bebop phrasing. However, just playing through the etudes will provide guitar players with a lot of great ideas to add to their vocabulary.

Once players get the etudes under their fingers they can play along with the included CD. Probably the most useful tracks to play along with are the tenor sax tracks. Playing along with Greg on the sax is a really fun and satisfying experience that will challenge your timing, tone, and articulation. Guitarists who are working to get that horn-style phrasing into their playing will especially benefit from this feature and this is the only book on the market that offers this option.

Below are videos of guitarist Mike Allemana demonstrating this feature with the etudes “Halsted Street” and “State Street”:

I really enjoyed working with this book and I hope that Greg Fishman will eventually make some of his other books available for guitarists as well. I think his books Jazz Saxophone Duets and Jazz Phrasing for Beginners would also translate particularly well for guitarists.

I need to figure out a way to create a database of songs and tag them the musical and technical challenges they present. For example, today one of my students wanted to work on “Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz. This song is an excellent device for students working on mastering their E-form barre chords (since 4 out of the 5 chords in the song use this shape) and eighth- and sixteenth-note rhythms. Other examples of songs that I use to help teach specific techniques include “Dust in the Wind” for pinch-pattern Travis picking and “Wildwood Flower” for improving right-hand string skipping. A lot of the time I can remember these things but sometimes I can’t. I have to do I little updating of the website this Summer, so I may see if it’s possible to use WordPress to tag some of these ideas and make them searchable, though it would be even better as an off-line database since I don’t have internet access in my main teaching studio at Studio E Music.