Tears In Heaven Guitar tab video

About this riff

The Unplugged guitar part is built on a fingerstyle pattern where the thumb keeps a steady alternating bass while the fingers pick out a melodic top line over chords like C, Cmaj7, F and G, so you have to keep two independent rhythmic layers going at once. The tricky part isn't speed but the smooth chord-to-chord voice leading and small hammer-ons/pull-offs woven into the pattern, which forces clean left-hand transitions without breaking the picking flow. It's a great study piece for anyone wanting to move from strumming to real fingerstyle accompaniment.

Did you know?

Clapton wrote the song for the 1991 film Rush after the death of his four-year-old son Conor, and he brought in lyricist Will Jennings to help finish it even though Jennings felt the subject was too personal for an outsider to touch. Jennings has said Clapton already had the first verse and asked him to write the rest of the verse and the bridge ("Time can bring you down..."). The song's most famous performance, the stripped-down acoustic version that most guitarists learn today, wasn't the original studio cut but a one-off arrangement played during the taping of Clapton's 1992 MTV Unplugged session.

Sources: [1] [2] [3]

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