In 2014 Imagine Dragons wrote "Warriors" as the entrance anthem for the League of Legends World Championship, which means roughly forty million people learned to feel heroic while a stranger destroyed their base. It is stadium-sized, chest-thumping, built to be sung by a crowd — so naturally I decided to play the whole thing alone in a room, no crowd, no band, no summoner's rift.
This clip is a MelodyChords arrangement: the melody and the chords squeezed onto one guitar at the same time, so you get the anthem without hiring a bassist, a keyboard player, and a choir of forty million. It is the League of Legends anthem, minus the ranked anxiety.
How this Warriors arrangement works
The trick with MelodyChords is voice separation: your thumb owns the low strings and keeps the anthemic root notes pumping (Warriors lives comfortably around a Gm–B♭–E♭–F kind of world), while your fingers pick the vocal melody on the top strings. The one rule that makes or breaks it — the melody note must always be the highest thing sounding. If a fat chord tone pokes out above the tune, the ear follows the wrong voice and the whole thing turns to mush. So voice your chords below the melody, let the low notes ring for that stadium sustain, and keep the top line clean and loud.
The useful takeaway: you almost never need the full six-string chord. Two or three well-chosen tones under the melody imply the harmony perfectly, and leaving strings out is what keeps your fretting hand free to catch the next melody note. If you like this one, the same thinking runs through my Flowers and Faded arrangements.
Play it loud enough and your neighbours will assume you have summoned a team of five. Grab the full tab and the Guitar Pro file over on Patreon — no jungle diff required.