There's a special kind of madness in trying to squeeze an entire Ed Sheeran production — the loops, the layers, the man's suspicious ability to sound like four of himself at once — onto one guitar and six strings. But that's exactly what Afterglow asks for, and honestly, underneath all that studio glow the song is so warm and simple that a single guitar carries it just fine.
This clip is my MelodyChords arrangement of Afterglow: about a minute and a half where the melody and the chords hold hands and refuse to let go. No backing track, no bandmates, no loop pedal — just the tune sung by the top string while the thumb quietly does the heavy lifting underneath.
How this Afterglow fingerstyle arrangement works
The whole trick of a MelodyChords (or chord-melody) arrangement is voice management: the melody always lives as the highest note you play, so your ear tracks it as "the tune," while the chord tones and bass sit politely below it. On Afterglow that means keeping the sung line on the top string, letting your thumb anchor the root of each chord, and filling the middle with just enough harmony to imply the full progression without muddying the melody.
Concrete takeaway: before you play a bar, find the melody note first and ask "which chord shape lets me reach that note on top?" Ed Sheeran's progression here is gentle and diatonic — a lot of the same handful of chords you already know — so nine times out of ten the melody note is already sitting inside the chord you're holding. Grab it with a spare finger, keep the bass moving on the beat, and the song basically arranges itself. If you want more of this thinking, my Make You Feel My Love arrangement runs on the exact same logic.
Fair warning: once you can play both the melody and the chords at the same time, you become physically incapable of strumming three cowboy chords at a campfire ever again — it's chord-melody or nothing. Grab the free PDF and the Guitar Pro file on my Patreon, and go ruin campfires responsibly.