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This song lesson is going to be a fun one. I am going to take the piano parts for “The Fool On The Hill” by The Beatles and and create a nice little fingerstyle guitar arrangement for it.
“The Fool On The Hill” was released in 1967 on The Magical Mystery Tour album and was written by Paul McCartney. It has some very interesting chord progressions in a additional to a key change from D major in the verse to D minor in the chorus. That kind of maneuver is very odd for a pop song. Usually you would move from a minor verse to major chorus but this modulation seems to make perfect sense in “The Fool On The Hill”.
If you want you could still perform pretty much all of this arrangement with a pick but I chose to use a block chord fingerstyle technique to better recreate how a pianist strikes all the notes at the same time instead of strumming the chords.
I would put this The Fool On The Hill guitar lesson at around an intermediate level. It does contain some rather large stretches and moves around the fretboard quite a bit. The moving bass lines can make everything a little bit more difficult as well.
But all in all we only have two different chord progressions to learn here so it shouldn’t take you too long to get everything under your fingers. I for one think “The Fool On The Hill” sounds great on guitar. That isn’t always the case when trying to recreate a piano part on the guitar, but I feel it worked out well this time around.
Just take your time and learn each section on it’s own first before putting them together and playing along with the original studio recording.
If you don’t want to do those moving bass lines in the D minor section that is fine. I was just trying to stay as close to the original piano parts as possible and it can make for the occasional awkward fingering on the guitar. Simply playing those chords with the regular picking pattern without the moving bass line sounds fine to.
So I hope you enjoy learning this one of many Paul McCartney masterpieces. The Beatles seem to have so many songs that work well being transcribed over to the guitar from the piano. That usually means that the song is simply good enough to stand on it’s own no matter what it is played on. That is certainly the case with “The Fool On The Hill”. 🙂
Carl…
