This month we’ll be taking a look at a hauntingly beautiful piano accompaniment piece by Claude Debussy called “Beau Soir”, that I’ve arranged for guitar. “Beau Soir” (French for “Beautiful Evening”) is an art song that Debussy wrote while in his early 20s, with the music inspired from and set to a poem by Paul Bourget that bears the same name.

Although this piece is written in the key of E major, it is loaded with many modulations that work really well for using all of the open strings on the guitar. In an attempt to imitate the rich sonorities of the piano, I mixed as many fretted notes with open strings as possible. All of the notes in this piece should blend together as much as possible.

download the full pdf file here

One technique very useful to help expand the upper range of the guitar is the touch harmonic. With this technique, a harmonic can be produced from any fretted note by the index finger of the picking hand exactly twelve frets above the note being fretted. A very soft touch is required by the picking hand index finger, as the thumb of the same hand plucks the string to produce the harmonic. Youtube guitarist Lenny Breau for more on this technique. Think of it as a transposed natural harmonic, with your right hand doing the work of two hands. Touch harmonics are indicated in this piece with (T.H.).

With the piano having slightly more than three octaves in range than a six-string guitar, it is
particularly challenging to pick which notes stay and which notes go. To help me decide, I
printed off the piano music and did a chordal analysis of the entire piece to help pinpoint the
core notes or “chord tones” for any given moment. I also eliminated a lot of “octave doubling” to
make this piece more guitar friendly, and I make use of octave transposition as well.

There are some pretty tricky fingerings and left hand stretches here so proceed with caution!

Looking to improve your guitar skills? Call Chambers Guitars for lessons at 615-898-0055.