Canon Rock Guitar Lesson

This lesson contains videos that break down the key parts of the popular Canon Rock song that took the YouTube world by storm.

[flv]http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/canonrock.flv[/flv]

Here’s the Canon Rock tab from Ultimate Guitar to follow along.

Here’s the Pachelbel’s Canon Rock backing track from the YouTube video – a difficult track to find on the Internet! Canon Rock Backing Track

Here’s the Pachelbel’s Canon Rock full song mp3 audio extracted from the YouTube video so you can listen to it, slow it down, etc. Canon Rock

I highly recommend that you buyTranscribe! for slowing down challenging pieces like this, looping difficult sections, and working them out one part at a time. It’s too frustrating to try and play each piece at full speed right off the bat.

Below you can buy 5 video lessons covering the volume swells, chords, 3 string arpeggios, sweep arpeggios with tapping, and melody. You also get diagrams and explanations of how the chords and solos work over the chords.

Volume Swells
[flv]http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/pachelbel_volumeswells.flv[/flv]

Chords
[flv]http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/pachelbel_chords.flv[/flv]

Sweep arpeggio
[flv]http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/pachelbel_sweeparpeggio_tap.flv[/flv]

Tab to the sweep and 3-string arps (see ultimate guitar tab for the full parts):
Canon Rock Lesson PDF

Melody
[flv]http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/pachelbel_melody.flv[/flv]

This is the scale shape for the melody. All the notes fit into this shape. For the shapes I refer to (eg. Shape 3 = Phrygian or C Shape), check out this blog post on the CAGED system – http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/2008/11/the-caged-system-for-guitar/

3-string arpeggios
[flv]http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/pachelbel_3string_arpeggios.flv[/flv]

Creating Your Own Solos Over Canon Rock

This lesson describes how to create your own solos over Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

Pachelbel’s Canon is in the key of D major. The chord progression is eight bars long and goes as follows:
D A Bm F#m G D G A

Here’s the Pachelbel’s Canon Rock backing track from the YouTube video – a difficult track to find on the Internet! Canon Rock Backing Track

We will start simple by playing root chord tones over each chord in Shape 5 we get the following:

In the key of D major we have the following notes: D E F# G A B C# D.
The chords as usual for major scales are: D Em F#m G A Bm C#dim D.

The chord tones for each are:

D – D F# A
Em – E G B
F#m – F# A C#
G – G B D
A – A C# E
Bm – B D F#
C# – C# E G

Let’s add a typical classical sounding sequence to the root notes, using eighth notes and play the idea twice in each measure.

Okay that’s not bad. Let’s try a smoother mostly descending line rather than jumping from root to root. This is known as voice leading. We will start on the root of D major then descend to the next closest chord tone for the next chord, staying in shape 5. For that we get:

Okay now let’s build the same sequence over this new voice leading line.

That sounds a bit smoother than the original, and demonstrates how you can start to add complexity to a simple chord tone framework. This is the key concept to absorb in this entire site!