"Game of Thrones" as Arrangement (& Drill)

Pretty sexy. Here's an excellent tab arrangement to get you started on your own version. Ramin Djawadi sold HBO a polished gem. The chord progression is a tight piece of work, simple and effective and fun on guitar, especially that when that G minor opens up. Trying to work out arpeggios led to mapping out the melody all over the fretboard. I've been on a "no open strings" kick lately, so here's the sequence I practice lately - this is the opening progression: C min, G min, A#, F min. These are good shapes for a pinky workout.



Now, here's that same sequence worked out as a practice drill to develop fluid fret jumping, laid out as 2 string phrases, thus it's deliberately hard to play. You'll clearly see the basic substitutions I've done to shift the notes from the D to the A string. Here's the basic concept, for that same chord progression:



Getting the Fearless Flying Pinky down takes a lot of patience. Practice the fret jumps with every finger, of course, not just the 4th one: each finger brings a different set of available positions once you've landed. Give yourself time and space to get it down right. Make sure you're visualizing the run as a single object instead of a "low section" and a separate high note you need to worry about. To make this exercise even more diabolical (and educational) you can flesh it out on every 2 string combination. Here's the C minor - this is the chord the theme opens up on, so you'll get ample opportunity to try this out:



So all in all, that's 5 versions of the same 4 note phrase. (string combos: EA, AD, DG, GB, BE) Walk that back down and you've got an even 8 bars of C minor, despite the fact your hands will be flying all over the neck the whole time.

This kind of OCD level iteration is more than just another finger strength exercise, though. Taking a full inventory of the available options a chord progression presents is an essential first step towards doing an arrangement (or composition) -- figuring out where reliable shortcuts and happy accidents give you the space to make the song yours. Although it's time-consuming and about as fun as algebra homework, I've been filling out pages of notebook like this for all kinds of songs I'm obsessed with, like Oltremare, Canon in D, or Blue in Green. This kind of detail gives me a roadmap to practice and improvise, and keeps me fluent with the theory behind everything I play. Amen.