Moon River – Instrumental Arrangement – Guitar Chord Melody

This is a fairly simple instrumental chord melody arrangement of the highly acclaimed song ‘Moon River’ written by Henry Mancini. I wanted to give this song a go after listening to the Grant Green recording, which I believe was recorded in the early 60’s, not long after the song was popularised in the 1961 movie ‘Breakfast at Tiffany's’.

It only occurred to me after starting to learn the piece that Grant played it in his quartet in 4/4 time, whereas the original song was written in 3/4 time. I ultimately decided to record it in 3/4 and in the Key of B Flat. This key complimented the arrangement I wanted to go for, keeping most of the chord shapes in the middle of the neck, with no open positions played.

The melody is all played on the guitar apart from bar 34, where I changed it to being played on the organ (for no particular reason). This then repeats in the third section of the song, after the solo. The solo section in the middle is mostly single lines with some more chord melody (which doesn’t follow the verse melody).

For recording the drum and bass parts, I used the programmes EZ bass and EZ Drummer. About two thirds of this was done by tweaking MIDI loops and the rest was by writing in from scratch. The organ part is a simple pad, sustaining the chords on the first beat of each bar. I also turned this down in the mix so that the guitar would predominate.