Alan Walker built "Faded" for a festival field full of 40,000 people, a wall of synths, and a bass drop that could rearrange your internal organs. I built it for one bloke, one wooden box with six strings, and neighbours who did not consent to any of this.
This 90-second clip is a MelodyChords arrangement of Faded — that gloriously nerdy trick where a single guitar plays the haunting lead melody AND the chords underneath it at the same time, no backing track, no DJ, no laptop. Just you, pretending to be an entire EDM production. Tabs are in the description.
How MelodyChords turns one guitar into Alan Walker's whole studio
The secret is voice separation. Your melody lives on the top strings — the highest note in every shape is the tune your ear is chasing — while your thumb quietly comps the chord progression underneath (Faded loops around a stubborn minor i–VI–III–VII, the same four chords doing all the emotional labour). The trick that makes it sound like two players: keep the melody notes ringing longer than the chord tones, and let common tones stay put so your hand barely moves between shapes. That's chord-melody thinking in a nutshell — pick the melody first, then ask "what's the cheapest chord I can fit under this note?"
Concrete takeaway: play the melody alone until it's boringly solid, THEN add one bass note per chord change on the downbeat. If you can hum the top line while your thumb thumps the root, you've already got 80% of a MelodyChords arrangement. Everything else is garnish. If you want the same recipe at half the speed, Can't Help Falling In Love is a gentler place to start.
Is it as loud as a festival main stage? No. Can you play it at 2am without a single kilowatt of subwoofer? Legally, yes — though my neighbours would like a word. If you'd like the Guitar Pro files and the original videos, they live on my Patreon.