For the upcoming Labour Day Weekend I thought I would give you a fun alternate picking song to play.

It’s a piece by J. S. Bach.

I’m sure you’ve heard his name before.

Bach is considered to be one the most important composers of all time.  Although Bach never actually wrote any music for the guitar, many of his pieces have become standard repertoire for guitar players.  His pieces have so much to offer guitarists.

The song we will look at today is Bourree II from Orchestral Suite Number 2.

Like all of Bach’s pieces it sounds great at any tempo.

This piece is for intermediate to advanced guitar players.

In this post, you will find PDF sheet music in tab and standard notation for you to download and print off.  I’ve also included an audio recording of the piece played on electric guitar.

The first thing you should do is click on the following link to download and print off the sheet music.  You can download the PDF for Bach’s Bourree II here –> Bach’s Bourree II

Now let’s dig into the piece.

The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s a nice short little piece.  So it shouldn’t take too long to memorize the song.

This piece consists of 2 sections that each repeat.  This is known as binary form.

Section 1 of the song is in 8^th position while section 2 is in 10^th position.  Let’s dig a little deeper into this…

In one of my previous posts, I explained how fret-hand positioning works.  If you haven’t read it, or need a quick review, read it here and come back:

Guitar Scale Lesson: How to Read Guitar Scale Diagrams

Now that you understand that scale fingerings are based on the concept of one finger per fret, I can explain the fingering used for this Bach piece.

In section one of this song (measures 1-4), you are in 8^th position.  This means that your first finger will play any notes found on the 8^th fret.  Your second finger will play notes found on the 9^th fret.  Your third finger will play notes on the 10^th fret.  And your pinky or 4^th finger, will play notes on the 11^th fret.

Now there is some stretching involved.  So what happens is your first finger actually performs double duty.  Your first finger will also stretch one fret lower to the 7^th fret and play any notes found there.

So lets do a quick recap of the fingering:

So now all you do is play through the first section of this song and simply apply the fingering principles shown above.

In section two of this song you move up to the tenth fret.  Your first finger will play notes on the 10^th fret.  Your second finger will play notes on the 11^th fret.  Your third finger will play notes on the 12^th fret. Your fourth finger has double duty in this section so it will play any notes found on the 13^th and 14^th frets.

So there you go.  You now know which fingers you need to use.  Other than that, the piece is pretty straight forward.

Here is the audio for the piece:

Bach Bourree II for Guitar

(Depending on your Internet connection speed, it may take a short while to load the audio)

Have fun with this song and have a great Labour Day Weekend!