Anyone else love Westworld? The season 2 trailer came with the most incredible strings and piano arrangement of Heart Shaped Box and I knew I had to do my own version, and here it is in anticipation for season 2 airing this Sunday! From a teaching standpoint, this arrangement tackles some cool thumb techniques like tapping and strumming, as well as some guitar inspired plucking in the beginning. As always, tabs and more are available at http://www.patreon.com/jgoldbergmusic. Enjoy!

Excellente. Good arrangement

Nirvana White

Thanks Steve!

Thanks Josh, now I've got to work up an arrangement of that late '80s song by Cobain. You've got all the elements in place and I'd like to call it a "Stick classic" if you don't mind.

Love the scope of those chords: G#m (or Abm) to E to C#7. I have to mess with it though and add a Bb7 somewhere toward the end. There's a jazz theory of chord substitutions (one of many such theories put to practice) where chordal roots related by minor 3rds can replace each other.

If arranged in the key of Cm, Nirvana's song would go: Cm to Ab to F and the wild chord would be D7. The roots D, F and Ab are minor 3rds apart and are jazz like substitutions for the IV chord (F7 in Cm). The missing chord in this network of roots separated by 3rds is B7, which could also work into this song.

Why transpose to C? For me, it's from my childhood accordion days. Actually, D might be a better common center for written notation because:

Going # - DAEB before F#.
Going b - DGCF before Bb.

That is f***ing excellent! WOW. Kurt's gotta be smilin' somewhere...

Thanks guys, glad you dig it!

Emmett! I'm honored that you'd consider this arrangement a classic! Wow! Good theoretical stuff too, I'll have to try it out.

That blew my mind. Awesome. So much going on. Need to incorporate some of those techniques in my playing somehow.

Thank you!

Such great string language happening in your performance Josh!

We rewatched the last episode of Season 1 in preparation for tonight. I must have scrubbed my brain for 30 minutes trying to figure out what song that was when we were watching trailers for the new season! That even did an arrangement of Black Hole Sun in another episode...

You made a really nice interpretation of Heart Shaped Box.