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How to play Someone to Watch Over Me

someone to watch over me. A great tune to play fingerstyle and not too hard to get under your hand.

Lead sheet with chords and lyrics for “Someone to Watch Over Me”.

Someone to Watch Over Me from “Nice ‘N Easy” July 1960

“Someone to Watch Over Me” was composed by George Gershwin with lyrics by Ira Gershwin in 1926 for the Broadway musical Oh, Kay. First recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1946 for his first album the Voice of Frank Sinatra and in 1954 for the film Young at heart.

Sinatra’s popular recordings of the song helped cement the standard slow style, and was notably covered by Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan, Barbra Streisand, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, Rickie Lee Jones, Elton John and Amy Winehouse.

Nelson Riddle arranged two lush orchestral versions, one backing Keely Smith (sang with and married to Louis Prima) and the other for Linda Ronstadt which won a Grammy Award. The song was also used prominently in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus

2022-06-06T18:32:10-04:00
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How to play “Ripple” on ukulele

How to play Ripple on ukulele… the first part of “Ripple”, anyway.
“Ripple” sounds pretty cool on the uke to me!

You can do this! Just be patient with yourself and go slowly. There’s a tab, video and an audio file of the tablature to follow along with. I would start with just the first phrase- “if my words did glow”- just that one part. Get it so it sounds as nice as you want it.

You’ll notice in the video you can hear two notes at at time which makes the playing sound a little fuller. That is the melody note and a harmony note which is generally just a chord tone! what that means is that we’ve found the melody note in a chord… and in some cases the adjacent melody notes are all in the same chord, which is pretty convenient because your hand is already in the right place.

The MP3 file below is exported from the MuseScore file that made the tab/notation so follow the tab to see exactly what is happening in the audio file. The video file, I took some liberties (and made a few errors). It is a great song though so give it a try!

PDF tabs and notation

2023-09-20T12:10:02-04:00
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How to play auld lang syne on guitar

If you’re hanging with friends for New Years and a guitar is handy, you’re pretty much obligated to do this tune :-)

The pdf below is the notation for Auld Lang Syne and will show you how to play auld lang syne on guitar. The notes are written in MuseScore and we can output a pdf of the sheet music/tablature and an audio file directly from that! The video on this page is in the key of F but if you’re looking for an easier version, use the chord, tab and lyric sheet in C below.

Musescore, btw is an excellent tool for any guitarist and it is completely free, which is amazing to me considering what you can do with it. Find out for yourself- download the program from musescore.org

Auld Lang Syne tabs and chords part 1 in F

Auld Lang Syne in C audio file from musescore (same as above)

Auld Lang Syne in C, chords, tabs and lyrics

Here’s a version we did for a holiday party at Laurel Circle this year. Very fortunate to play with the trio, plus drums, baritone and tenor sax.

2023-06-06T08:19:15-04:00
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How to play “8 days a week”

Here’s a great Beatles tune with pretty simple, hand-friendly changes. You can certainly play this just by strumming the changes but you can also pick individual notes out of them- and even better, the melody notes are not difficult to get out of the chord shapes at all. Give it a listen and reach out to me if you’re interested in more information about how to play “8 days a week” solo finger style on acoustic guitar.

Lyrics and chords here!

2022-08-03T14:29:37-04:00
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Building chords from the 5 string

Building chords from the 5 string!

Building chords from the 5 string. We know the C scale has no flats or sharps and also that we can play Major chords (triads) with the 1, 3 and 5 scale notes. We can figure that combination out from any note on the 5th string! For instance a C Major is made of a C, and E and a G (1,3 and 5): C D E F G A B C

major chord from the five stringWe know that the “two strings up and two frets back” rule can give us the same note but an octave up. We can do that from the 6 string and the 5 string. Let’s concentrate on the 5 string first. So C on the 5 string is at the 3rd fret and consequently, on the 5th fret of the G string. That gives us our one note in two places!

Starting with C on the 3rd fret of the A string, we can see D on the open D string, E on the 2nd fret, F on the 3rd and G on the 5th. The G on the 5th fret is important to us! Now we have 1 and […]

2025-08-16T18:48:07-04:00
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Autumn Leaves

How to play autumn leaves solo fingerstyle guitar. This song is one I’ve been playing for a while- the changes are not too hard and they’re beautiful, I think. You can hear I rely quite a bit on a blues progression to fill in- it fits pretty well. If you’re interested in playing this style of music- or this lovely tune- let me know!

autumn leaves chart

“Autumn Leaves” is a popular song and jazz standard composed by Joseph Kosma in 1945 with original lyrics by Jacques Prévert in French (original French title: “Les Feuilles mortes”), and later by Johnny Mercer in English. An instrumental version by pianist Roger Williams was a number one best-seller in the US Billboard charts of 1955.

Kosma was a native of Hungary who was introduced to Prévert in Paris. They collaborated on the song Les Feuilles mortes (“The Dead Leaves”) for the 1946 film Les Portes de la nuit (Gates of the Night) where it was sung by Irène Joachim and Yves Montand. The poem was published, after the death of Jacques Prévert, in the book “Soleil de Nuit” in 1980. Kosma was influenced by a piece of ballet music, “Rendez-vous” written for Roland Petit, performed in Paris at the end of the Second World War, large parts of the melodies are exactly the same, which was itself borrowed partially from […]

2025-07-21T20:39:34-04:00
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