Felix Mendelssohn - Wedding March - Guitar Tab

Great Cathedral Organs of England

2008 4:30

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About Wedding March

Arranging Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March for guitar is a rewarding challenge in translating a piece built for the full, sustained voice of a church pipe organ. Written in 1842 as part of his incidental music for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the piece sits in C major, which is friendly for open-position chord work but demands careful fingering when you want to carry the melody cleanly above a moving bass line. The stately tempo of 140 BPM means each beat carries weight, and rushing even slightly collapses the ceremonial feel. The hardest part is keeping the bass notes ringing while the melody moves independently on the higher strings, a classic fingerstyle coordination problem. Use the Practice Toolbar to loop those melody-over-bass passages slowed right down until each voice feels separate and deliberate. Classical technique, particularly rest-stroke picking for the melody and free-stroke for the accompaniment, will give you the clearest separation of voices.

• The piece is in C major, making open-position chord voicings available, but clean melodic lines over a sustained bass will require deliberate left-hand fingering.
• The main challenge on guitar is voice independence: keeping bass notes ringing while the melody moves freely on treble strings, a core fingerstyle skill.
• Classical fingerstyle technique, using rest strokes to project the melody and free strokes for the bass, is the most effective approach to matching the organ's layered texture.