Douglas Niedt Presents
PLAY IT LIKE A PRO™
TAKE FIVE: Goals
This is Douglas Niedt's outstanding arrangement of the great jazz standard by Paul Desmond, made famous by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. This fingerstyle arrangement can be played on a nylon-string classical guitar, acoustic, or steel-string electric guitar. For intermediate to advanced players.
My goals for this arrangement of Take Five were:
- To maintain the repeated chord progression of the piano part throughout each verse and improvisation section, while keeping the feel of the Take 5 melody as performed by composer/sax player Paul Desmond. In other guitar arrangements, the 5/4 accompaniment is incomplete or drops out intermittently, which ruins the song.
- To maintain the independent rhythm of the bass line from the sax solo in the chorus.
- To include an "improvisation" section. Of course a written out improvisation is not an improvisation! But because of the difficulty of improvising on top of an accompaniment on fingerstyle guitar, I have written out this "improvisation" based upon actual improvisations by Paul Desmond.
While the goals were straightforward, the execution of Take Five is far from easy. That is why I have provided the high-def videos to help you learn to play Take Five correctly and accurately. Watching them will save you hours of frustration and wasted time.