What Am I Gonna Do - Chris Stapleton (play-along for guitar)

This is a screen-capture video from a TuneLing for "What Am I Gonna Do" from the album "Higher", by Chris Stapleton. This song is also available in a separate TuneLing video for ukulele! Notes: This song - written by Chris Stapleton and Miranda Lambert - may seem simple - and it is - but it's nothing less than a masterpiece of the country genre! And here's why... For starters, the lyric is so pure, and gut-wrenchingly emotional, that it could have been written by Hank Williams himself. And Chris Stapleton's vocal performance is just stunning, as always. But there are other subtleties that really set it apart from the crowd. The song structure is unusual: where we would typically expect to hear verses, interspersed with choruses, what we are hearing is a single chorus, repeated three times, with two short verses in between them. One could certainly argue that the choruses are verses - or vice versa. Of course, there are no rules to apply, and either way, it works perfectly - but this structure is uncommon. The bridge and the coda are both the basis for understated guitar solos, and they both diverge not only from the verse and chorus chord patterns, but also from each other. As for the arrangement, and the chord voicings (or "shapes"), there are very subtle touches that really matter. 1) The intro is a single bar - mostly just one sustained chord, then four bars of naked guitar and voice. There's a very slight stop, halfway through bar 5 - just a fragment of silence that perfectly sets up the entry of the full band. That's the little gap you see in the ruler section of bar 5. 2) We've notated the G chord two ways, at different points - one is the standard three-finger shape, and the other moves the third finger to the second string, adding the fourth finger on the first string (both at the third fret). Either way, it's the same chord, and you can certainly use either voicing, anywhere you like. But we really like the four-finger version, when the G chord is adjacent to the C9 chord, because it's not just easier to play the C9, but it just sounds huge to change chords by moving only the first and second fingers from the fifth and sixth strings, to the fourth and fifth strings. These voicings are a hallmark of Chris's guitar style, by the way. He frequently uses these very simple enhancements for common chords - adding a ninth (the D in the C9 chord), or a sixth, or moving back and forth between plain major chords and their sus4 versions. Often, these little touches reduce necessary hand motion, but they're not lazy - they actually make these chords sound much richer, especially when used on multiple chords in a single song. 3) There's more than one rhythm guitar on the recording, and you might notice that in a number of places, there's definitely one guitar playing a G-Gsus4-G pattern up high on the neck, at the seventh fret (using a "D" chord shape), while the primary part stays in the lower position. You can hear it in bars 16, 17, 20, and 37 at least, but we've only notated it in the Bridge, at bar 25. You can use it wherever you like of course, and with a single guitar playing, it might be best to stay low. But we wanted to show you how to get that pure high sound in those sections, if you want to. So as you can see, the song might be simple, but it's polished like a diamond! Please LIKE this video and SUBSCRIBE to the TuneLings channel, to help more people lead happier lives by making music! --- The FREE TuneLings app is fully interactive - you learn by playing along, with speed and pitch controls, looping, annotations, and power-features galore - for almost any stringed instrument. The app allows anyone to acquire, play, make and sell TuneLings - and musicians get paid! Please visit www.tunelings.com to learn more, and get the App!