Losing a big match to England stings. You know what stings even more? Sitting down afterwards and lovingly arranging your conqueror's national anthem for guitar, note by note, just so you can hum it through gritted teeth. Congratulations, England — you knocked Switzerland out of the Euros, and this is my extremely mature, not-at-all-petty revenge: a flawless little cover of God Save the King.
This 32-second clip takes England's national anthem — the one that plays every time they line up before kickoff — and puts the whole thing, melody and chords together, onto a single guitar. No brass band, no choir, just six strings and one mildly bruised Swiss ego. (If you'd rather cheer for the home team, my Swiss anthem arrangement is right here to restore the balance.)
How God Save the King works on guitar
Here's the nerdy bit that makes this anthem more interesting than it has any right to be. It sits in C major and it's in 3/4 time — a slow, dignified triple meter that gives it that swaying, ceremonial gait. But the phrase structure is genuinely weird: instead of a tidy 8 or 16 bars, the whole tune is 14 bars — a six-bar opening ("God save our gracious King") answered by an eight-bar continuation. Your ear expects symmetry and quietly doesn't get it, which is exactly why it feels grand rather than sing-songy.
The concrete takeaway for a chord-melody arrangement: keep the tune on your top strings and let plain C-major chords — C, F, G — carry most of it, then reach for an E7 as a secondary dominant pulling into A minor. That one borrowed chord is the "royal lift" that stops it sounding like a nursery rhyme. Bonus trivia to annoy your friends: this exact melody is also Liechtenstein's anthem and the old American "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" — one tune, several flags.
So no, I'm not bitter. I'm growing as a person by memorising the anthem of the team that ended my summer. If that's your idea of healthy coping too, the Guitar Pro file and PDF are on my Patreon — pip pip.