Mozart’s 40th Symphony Arranged for Lead Guitar
Classical music can most definitely rock.
This is one of my favorite pieces to teach students who are taking private guitar lessons and are working on improving their lead guitar playing abilities. The melodies aren’t too difficult, and the tempo of this is just fast enough to be challenging but not so fast that it’s impossible. I spent a great deal of time looking at different ways to play some parts, and to be honest, there might be some sections that you might think could be played differently.
There are a couple of sections that are good workouts for the left hand.
Measure 35: Use your index finger to play the F note (6th fret) at the end of the measure, and then just slide it back to the 5th fret at the beginning of the next measure.
Measure 85 – 96: This section gets a little crazy. Use your index finger to play the last note of measure 85 (A – 19th fret of 5th string) and then middle and index again for the next two notes of measure 86. That will set you up to play the next couple of measures. In measure 88, you’ll just have to stretch back with the index finger to the 14th fret, swhich shouldn’t be too difficult in the upper register of the neck where the frets are smaller. In measure 91, make sure you use your ring finger on the first note (17th fret) and then pinky finger on the 18th fret, and then slide that finger up to the 20th fret. In measure 93, you’ll do a sweep arpeggio across an F chord form, and then the rest of that section stays in that 18th fret area. Play the last few measures with your index finger laying across the 18th fret of the first and second strings.
Feel free to comment on this arrangement. I tried to keep the rhythms as simple as possible to facilitate sight reading. I would strongly recommend playing along with a recording of this symphony, as that will make it a lot easier to put everything together and play the entire composition. The whole transcription is 10 pages, so it’s not going to be easy to play it while reading it.
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Comments 3
Gracias, excelente pieza y de gran ayuda.
Thank you very much for publishing the Notes and Rhythms!
We tried to write down the Notes and Rhythms of Symphony 40 ourselves. When we found your ones, these are very detailed. Thank you!