There are songs you're proud to know, and then there's "Right Round" — the one that permanently welded itself into your brain during a certain Vegas movie about a missing groom and a tiger in the bathroom. Bad news: it's an earworm. Good news: it's an earworm you can now play entirely by yourself.
This little clip is a MelodyChords arrangement of Right Round on solo guitar — the melody and the chords living on the same six strings at the same time, so you can turn a dance-pop hit into a self-contained party for one.
How this MelodyChords arrangement works
The trick behind any chord melody is embarrassingly simple to say and annoyingly fiddly to do: the melody note is always the highest note you play, and everything underneath it is just enough chord to hold it up. Your thumb (or an open string) grabs the root down low, your top finger sings the tune, and the middle strings fill in whatever chord tones you can actually reach without dislocating a knuckle.
Right Round is a friendly place to start, because the hook is short, repetitive, and stubbornly catchy — the melody sits politely on top while the chords loop underneath. Concrete takeaway: harmonize each melody note with the nearest chord tone below it, and drop any note you don't strictly need. Nobody will miss the fifth. If you're unsure which notes are melody and which are chord, figuring out the chords and melody of a song first makes the whole thing click.
Is arranging pop songs for solo guitar a slightly unhinged hobby? Absolutely. Do I have twenty-six of these and counting? … Also absolutely. Grab the Guitar Pro file and the original videos on my Patreon.