Guitar Logic

The Girl from Ipanema

Added 2020-06-09 17:09:20 +0000 UTC

This one has been arranged for two guitars: a solo guitar and a straightforward bossa nova rhythm accompaniment.

The brilliant thing about it is that both theme and accompaniment can also stand alone because they each sound good on their own.

As you probably know this song has an A-A-B-A form. The B part has quite an exciting harmony that merges beautifully with the famous A part, and that's all it needs :). After listening to many versions of this song you realize that each musician or performer adds an intro as their special contribution. It seems an intro is a must! So I made one here using two adjacent chords, F and Gb, accenting each one on the off beats. At the end of the intro both guitars lead descendingly into the theme.

For the theme I made a clean fingerstyle with a few variations here and there; wanting to find a middle ground between sounding too jazzy or too straightforward.

Later in the solo I put a pinch of Travis picking which actually turned out to be a really nice combination with the bossa nova guitar in the background.