As stated, I love Pink Floyd. Wish You Were Here is a great entry into understanding how to arrange rock tunes for the mandolin. This arrangement is probably 15 years old. Though in the old video it is performed on octave, it works equally well with straight mandolin.
The main thing is to have a loose wrist. To my ear and preference, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull is rock’s best acoustic guitarist. I love the way he approaches acoustic and much of the way I conceptualize octave comes from Ian. The strumming at times approaches the way Ian plays tunes like Mother Goose, Aqualung, Thick as a Brick, Jack in the Green, etc. However, the solo played in the video is near note to note David Gilmour, who is one of my favorite guitarists.
If you ever attend a camp I’m at where I teach rock mandolin, odds are that I’ll use this as a tune to demonstrate how to build an arrangement. Additionally the solo shows how the same pentatonic scale–like any mode–is the same if the scale is based on the I (like G Major in this song) or the vi minor (in this song Em). It starts the discussion on major vs minor pentatonic in blues, country, and rock.
Arrangement is available free on Patreon for everyone.
