Please Please Please - Sabrina Carpenter - Fingerstyle Guitar Arrangement

I have posted an instructional (tutorial) video for this performance which you can find here:    • Please Please Please - Fingerstyle Gu...  

Fingerstyle arrangement of Sabrina Carpenter’s recent number-one hit ‘Please Please Please’. I liked this song as soon as I heard it and thought it would be a good challenge to try and play as a solo instrumental guitar piece, which it was! The tempo is as close to the 107bpm of the original track I could play and it’s in the same key too, A major.

The arpeggiated synth lines at the start sounded like simple major and minor shapes, which they are, although the second C sharp minor starts on the fifth above the root and spans over 2 octaves, as does the final E major before going into the verse.

Overall, this is an interesting song to play because it’s got some nice chord variations and a dynamic and quite big vocal melody range. I noticed breaking the song down that Sabrina’s vocals are harmonised throughout, but I simply with the predominant melody for each note (typically the highest).

The other thing I like about this song is that it only has one repeated section, which is the second chorus, but even then, the vocal melody is slightly different to the first. The second verse incorporates a key change to C major, which as well as being a very creative piece of songwriting, is also a welcome relief for playing fingerstyle guitar (C major is far more comfortable than A major)!

This is the first cover song that I’ve used the MIDI output feature on the Godin Multiac guitar on as well. I set up a couple of synths to trigger with it behind the guitar track using the Fabfilter Twin 3 synthesiser plugin. Guitar tone wise, it’s a spilt and slightly panned Wet / DI signal, using a Helix rack and the Neural DSP archetype: Tim Henson – which has an acoustic amp setting designed for Nylon string guitar.