“Your Mother Should Know” arranged for fingerstyle guitar

This is a song off of the “Magical Mystery Tour” album and has a really catchy melody.  It wasn’t too difficult to incorporate the melody into the chord changes, and so here is the arrangement that I did:

Some things to note about this arrangement:

Measure 1 – Use your thumb to strum down on the notes on beat one.  You’ll do that again on the E7 chord later in the song.  This saves you from having to pinch the pair of notes with your thumb and index finger and thus have to stray from the standard finger assignment to the strings (i.e. thumb handles strings 6-4 while index, middle and ring take care of strings 3, 2, 1 respectively).

Measure 2 – Use your left hand thumb to play the root note of this F major chord.

Measure 4 – use your right hand (picking hand) index or middle finger to play that F note on the “and” of 2, not the thumb.

Measure 9 and 10 – this is a little tricky, but not impossible.  You have to switch fret hand fingers on the root notes.  You start off playing the root of G7 with your second finger, and then while playing the open notes switch and put your third finger down on the root note to make it easier to use the first and fourth finger to play the melody notes.  If your fingers are long enough, in theory you could leave the second finger down the whole time and just really stretch between the first and second finger (this is all in reference to the fret hand).  On Measure 10, you start off with your third finger on the root note, and then have to switch to the second finger.  Once again, you could alternatively lay your index finger down over the fourth through first strings to cover the E bass note and the melody note, but either way is fine.

Want some more tabs?  Check out the “Easy Beatles Songs” blog post.