Let Her Go

Thomas is back with another incredible acoustic lesson, this time, taking on Passenger's beautiful track - 'Let Her Go'. The emotional intro does an amazing job of creating the atmosphere for the rest of the song. Recreating this is not an easy job by any means, as it requires a lot of precision in both hands, with a variety of techniques. So, if you're ready to take on this pretty advanced challenge, grab your guitar and let's get going!

Please use the video as your main resource for this lesson. There is a large variety of different plucking combinations, and there won't be any tabs provided in the write-up. Thomas outlines every detail of the track brilliantly, and the written lesson will help you focus on each section.

Intro

It's relatively unusual for the intro of a song to be the hardest, and most complex section. You might have heard Thomas mention that we need to use a right-hand technique called Travis-picking to accurately recreate the intro. Named after the guitarist Merle Travis, this picking technique uses the thumb to pluck the bass notes on the lower strings, with the fingers plucking the higher strings.

As there won't be any tabs of the track, I've provided a short exercise for you to practice shapes of Travis-picking before we look at the chords we need to play!

Make sure you're comfortable with the technique before putting it over the chords. The chord shapes used in the track should be familiar at this level of playing, but they're made more difficult by the fact that we need to place our capo on the 7th fret - making it a very tight squeeze on the fretboard.

The chord shapes used throughout the intro are F, Am and G. Each of these chords has its own embellishment, including the main melodic motif. Therefore, it's essential that you watch how Thomas approaches each chord in the video to truly capture the sound.

I would recommend practicing the picking pattern for each chord before playing through the entire chord progression. This will really help give you a feel for where each embellishment is played, and help your muscle-memory understand what pattern is played over each chord.

Though the image above shows us that we need to simply repeat the same chords, the second repeat is slightly different because of the embellishments played. Maybe I'm just being nit-picky, but I really believe it's important to play this intro note-for-note!

Chorus 1

I hope you're enjoying Travis-picking, as we're going to need to keep it up for this first chorus! Though this section has an additional chord - Am - it'll feel a bit easier than the intro, as it doesn't have the tricky little embellishments. I know I sound like a broken record here, but please be sure to watch the video for the detailed breakdown of which strings you need to pick over this progression!

Verse

The chorus leads us straight into the verse, and from here on out, we're going to be strumming instead of Travis-picking. We're adding just one new chord in this section - Em - so, the challenge is going to be in getting the strumming pattern correct.

Most tracks use the same strumming pattern throughout the section, or even the full song. However, the verse in this track features two different patterns. To keep things tidy and legible, I'll provide the chord progression before we take a look at the strumming patterns.

The first strumming pattern is used over every chord except G major, and it looks like this:

The strumming pattern for the G chord might feel slightly odd at first, as we're starting the pattern with an up-strum. Be sure to practice both strumming patterns for the verse together, as it will feel more natural than seeing the G major strumming pattern as it's own entity.

Chorus 2

The second chorus is a repeat of the first chorus, however, this time we need to strum it instead of Travis-picking. We need to play the same progression as chorus 1, with the same strumming patterns as the verse.

The one catch in this section is that we need to use strumming pattern 1 over the first time we play the G major. However, when we play the double G major at the end of the progression, we need to use strumming pattern 2 (the G major pattern).

Bridge

Following the second chorus is a short bridge. This section is essentially the same as the verse, with a slight tweak in the progression. We again want to use strumming pattern 1 for every chord except G major, which we want to use the second strumming pattern for.

Outro

To finish this beautiful piece, we want to play the exact same chords as the chorus. Instead of using strumming patterns, we want to just give each chord one strum at the start of each bar. This helps take the away the momentum in the rhythm, and lets the track come to a tranquil and quiet end.