Avicii wrote a song about wearing your heart on your sleeve, and I responded by taking one guitar, no band, no laptop, no festival pyro, and trying to squeeze the entire thing onto six strings while very much wearing my sweat on my sleeve.
This is the very first entry in my MelodyChords series: a solo fingerstyle arrangement of Avicii's "Heart Upon My Sleeves" (yes, the one Imagine Dragons sings), where the melody and the chords stop fighting and finally share the same instrument.
How the MelodyChords trick works
The whole idea is embarrassingly simple and endlessly hard: your thumb plays the bass and chord roots underneath, while your fingers keep the sung melody as the highest, loudest note on top. Everything in between is just enough chord tone to imply the harmony without burying the tune. An EDM track like this is really a big synth pad plus a vocal line, so the arrangement job is to fake the pad with a few sustaining chord notes and let the melody ring clearly above them. That's the same principle behind every good EDM-to-guitar arrangement.
Concrete takeaway: pick out the melody first, alone, until you can hum-and-play it. Only then add the nearest chord tones underneath, and mute anything that competes with the top note. If the melody survives, you have a MelodyChords part; if it drowns, you have a strumming pattern with delusions of grandeur.
Grab the PDF and Guitar Pro file, and if you want to fund my slow descent into arranging every Avicii song for solo guitar, my Patreon is right there, wearing its heart on its sleeve.