The Chairs of a Country Arrangement

Every chair in a country arrangement, with the reference material for playing it and the part it holds down while somebody else takes the fill.

The instruments below carry most of a country arrangement, and each one is there to do a job the others are not doing at the same moment. That division of labour is what the parts engine shows as computed cells; this page is the reference material for actually playing each chair — every chord, every scale, a key read by its diatonic chords, and for every chair on strings a map of the whole neck.

None of these is ours. Every one of them has a deep home elsewhere in the Warrior Network — the site that covers its whole family, its alternate tunings, its technique and its gear — and every page below doors out of here: to that home once it is open, and, for every chair on strings, to the same page on String Warrior, the network's hub, as well. What you get here instead is the arrangement reading: the same chord, framed by the part this chair plays once the song is actually running.

Pick a chair

Guitar

The floor everything else is timed against. Chords for the boom-chick strum, scales for a flatpicked fill, and a neck map for finding the same shape two frets along.

EADGBE

Bass

One note at a time, and the mix hears every one as the chord. Root-and-fifth shapes, fingerboard positions, and the scales the walk between them comes from.

EADG

Mandolin

The backbeat chop, and a lead voice the moment it stops. Closed chord shapes that damp cleanly, and the short scales a fill is cut from.

GDAE

Banjo

The roll under the singer — picked note by note, never strummed. Open-G shapes and the movable ones up the neck, and the scales a melody note is lifted out of on top of the roll.

GDGBD

Fiddle

Pads under the verse and the voice that answers the singer at phrase ends. No frets to correct you, so these are position maps and double stops.

GDAE

Dobro

Slide fills and turnaround answers, face-up in open tuning. Bar positions across the open-G strings, scales for a slide fill, and a full board map.

GBDGBD

Lap Steel

A held chord under the singer, slid into place with a steel bar. Bar positions in the chord its strings are tuned to, scales for a slid fill, and a full board map.

CEGACE

Pedal Steel

The intro hook, a pedal-bend fill between lines and a long pad under the chorus. Bar positions on both necks' open strings, and every key's called changes drawn as pedal moves.

E9 and C6

Piano

Chordal pads under the verse and a fill going into the turnaround. Every chord as voicings on a keyboard, scales lit by degree, and every key read by its diatonic chords.

88 keys

Every reference page, chair by chair

Four sections for every chair on strings, three at the piano. Chords and scales run to every root and every quality; the keys page gives the diatonic chords; the explorer maps the whole board — and the piano has no explorer, because a keyboard has no board to map.

Guitar — the boom-chick floor

Bass — root and fifth

Mandolin — the chop on the backbeat

Banjo — the roll under the singer

Fiddle — pads and turnarounds

Dobro — slide fills

Lap Steel — the held steel chord

Pedal Steel — the hook, the bend and the pad

One chair, two necks: the E9 and the C6, the pedal steel's two standard tunings. Each neck's chord pages chart its open strings, with no pedal or lever down; its key pages draw every called change as a pedal move — where the bar sits, which pedals and knee levers go down or come up, both charts, and a Hear button that bends the ringing strings into the next chord.

Piano — pads and the fill into the turnaround

The banjo, and the job it does

Not every country record carries a banjo, and on the ones that do it is rarely the loudest thing in the mix. Its job is the roll: thumb, index and middle picking through the chord one string at a time, a steady stream of single notes that fills the eighths a two-feel leaves empty, so a song keeps moving forward while the guitar is only strumming on the beat. When the groove is already full — a train beat, with bass and guitar on every eighth — the banjo stops rolling and vamps instead, a closed shape pinched and damped on the backbeat, the same job the mandolin's chop does. The chair here is the five-string: tuned to an open G chord, with a short fifth string that drones a high G, which is why so many of its shapes ring open in the keys country singers reach for first. The tenor and plectrum four-strings belong to other music. The banjo's whole family — its tunings, its right-hand technique, its capo and its gear — lives on Banjo Warrior, and every banjo page here links there; what this site adds is where the roll sits against the other chairs, groove by groove, on the parts engine.