Shape of My Heart

#music/fingerstyle · a companion to Guitar

Sting, Ten Summoner's Tales (1993). The guitar figure was written by Dominic Miller, who is credited as co-writer — worth knowing, because people call it "the Sting riff" and it is really a guitarist's piece that a singer built a song on top of.

It is the piece a lot of people learn fingerstyle for. Worth being clear about why it is hard, because it is not the notes.

What it is actually made of

Strip the song away and the figure is one device, executed very well:

An arpeggiated chord sequence over a bass line that moves independently.

That is it. The right hand rolls through the notes of a chord while the thumb walks somewhere the chord shape does not follow. The magic — and the difficulty — is that the two hands are doing arithmetic at different speeds.

Three things make that style sound the way it does:

1. A held top note across changing chords. One string rings the same pitch while the harmony moves underneath it. The ear hears a constant while everything else shifts, which is where the wistfulness comes from.
2. A descending bass. Bass lines that step down feel like gravity. Almost every piece that gets called "haunting" is doing this.
3. Chords voiced to keep the common tone available — which usually means partial shapes, not textbook grips. See Beyond the triad: this is where sus and add voicings earn their keep, because they let a note stay put while the chord changes around it.

None of that is unique to this song. Learn to hear it and you have a key to a whole genre.

The right hand

Classical fingerstyle notation, which the licensed tab will use:

The skill is thumb independence. The thumb must keep a steady pulse while i-m-a do something rhythmically different above it. This is the actual wall, and it is a coordination problem rather than a guitar problem — the same wall as playing different rhythms with each hand on a piano.

The drill that builds it, and it is worth a fortnight on its own:

1. Anchor a simple chord — Am will do.
2. Thumb plays the 5th string on every beat. Metronome at 50 BPM. Nothing else.
3. Keep that going and add i on the off-beat. Only that.
4. When it is automatic, add m, then a.
5. Now change chord without the thumb faltering.

If the thumb hesitates when the chord changes, you are not ready for the piece. That is not a discouragement — it is the actual prerequisite, and it is learnable in weeks.

The left hand

Two things worth knowing before you start:

• The shapes are mostly partial. Three and four-string grips, not full barres. If a transcription has you barring constantly, it is probably not the shape Miller uses.
• Fingers stay down. Much of the fluency comes from leaving one or two fingers planted through a change, exactly like the Cadd9 family in Beyond the triad. Look for the note that does not move and anchor it.

How to learn this — or any riff — by ear

Genuinely worth doing before buying the tab. You will learn more in an hour of this than in a week of reading someone else's numbers.

1. Find the tonic. Hum the note the phrase resolves to. Find it on the guitar. That is Sa (Sargam and the scale) — everything else is measured from there.
2. Get the bass first. Bass notes are slower, louder and easier to hear than the arpeggios above them. Write down just the bass line.
3. Slow it down. Any player that changes speed without changing pitch — the phone apps do this now. Work at 50–70%.
4. Loop two bars. Not the whole piece. Two bars, thirty times.
5. Add one note per chord. With a bass note and one more, the shape is usually forced — there are not many chords containing both.
6. Separate the hands. Learn the fretting changes silently, with no picking. Then practise the picking pattern on open strings, with no fretting. Then join them. Trying to learn both at once is what makes people conclude they are untalented.

Practising it

The method from Rhythm and tempo, and it applies here more than anywhere:

• Start at a tempo where it is perfect, not one where it is nearly right. That will feel humiliatingly slow. Do it anyway.
• Four clean repetitions, then +5 BPM.
• When it falls apart, drop 10 and stay there for a day.
• Play it without the metronome once a session, to check it still breathes.

The figure is not fast. Nobody is impressed by speed here, and rushing is the single most common way it gets ruined — the piece depends on space.

What it gives you afterwards

The reason to learn it is not the party trick. It is that once the thumb is independent, an enormous amount of music opens up: Travis picking, most acoustic singer-songwriter material, classical studies, and the ability to accompany yourself without a band.

This piece is a good teacher because it is slow enough to hear your own mistakes and hard enough to be worth the fortnight.

Related: Beyond the triad · Rhythm and tempo · Chords