“Blackbird” - The Beatles

Well, here it is folks. Was there ever any doubt that “Blackbird” would show up on this list? This must be THE most popular fingerpicking guitar song ever, & for good reason - actually more like hundreds of good reasons. I’ve been playing this song for many years, & still find new connections with it. This project gave me another chance to really take it apart & study it all over again.

The arrangement goes a bit beyond the traditional way McCartney plays it - & I’m not doing the claw-hammer thing. Most of what I was really paying attention to improving this time around was the right hand picking technique. Experimenting with how hitting the strings from different angles effects the sound, I tried to find the most suitable finger combinations for delivering each individual phrase. I was thinking a lot about the lyrics too. The TAB from the book has some brilliant tricks to get the vocal melody into the guitar arrangement. Which is great cause Blackbird can be kind of a hard song to sing. Like the rent, it’s just too damn high.

Also tempo seemed to be a big concern. I don’t know the exact BPM of this, & it probably changes throughout the length of the song. When I was listening back to some practice takes, I felt that slightly faster than this sounded rushed, & anything slower felt like a drag.

ps. Sorry for the pjs. This was supposed to be just a practice take to set up the video. But I have some other stuff I have do today, so we’re going with this.

Oh &, spoiler-alert, I think tomorrow’s “The Boxer”.