Nothing says "welcome to a fun family film about children fighting to the death" quite like a swelling patriotic anthem. Horn of Plenty is James Newton Howard's Panem national hymn — the tune the Capitol blasts while pretending everything is fine, and it is easily one of the most gorgeously sinister things ever written for a movie about a very bad reaping.
So naturally I put the whole thing on one guitar. This is a MelodyChords arrangement: the melody and the chords live in the same six strings at the same time, no backing track, no orchestra, no menacing off-screen voiceover. Just me, nearly two minutes of solo fingerstyle, and the growing suspicion that the anthem is judging my volunteer status.
How the MelodyChords approach works
The whole trick of a MelodyChords / chord-melody arrangement is that the melody note always has to be the highest thing you hear. So instead of grabbing a normal chord shape and hoping, you build each voicing so the tune sits on top — usually on the high E or B string — while your thumb keeps a bass note going underneath and the inner strings quietly fill in the harmony. Three jobs, one hand, no orchestra to blame when it falls apart.
The useful takeaway: don't learn the melody and the chords separately and then panic. Find where the melody note lives inside each chord shape first, keep that note ringing as the top voice, and let everything below it be as skeletal as you can get away with. For a slow, ominous anthem like this you can strip the harmony down to two or three notes and it still sounds full, because the ear follows the tune and fills in the rest — the same instinct that makes The Hanging Tree work on a lone guitar.
And yes, I know playing the anthem of a fictional authoritarian regime is a weird flex, but at least this Cornucopia only demands your practice time. Want the PDF and Guitar Pro file so your fretting hand can volunteer as tribute? It is on my Patreon.