Below is the lesson for “Ave Maria” by Franz Schubert.

Helpful Tips

A gorgeous take on one of Schubert’s most popular works. This arrangement tastefully blends melody and harmony to create an intricate fingerstyle piece that’s perfect for the budding advanced player.

Rhythmically, this piece is fairly straightforward. But there are a few bars that are syncopated. For example, take a look at the first two measures in Theme 1.

Click the image to enlarge it.

Listen to these 2 bars being played alongside a metronome.

As we’re playing in 6/8, we want to count 6 eighth notes per measure. Bar 1 is simply that.

But take a look at the second bar. We can see syncopation in the latter half of it. In this situation, we want to split beat 5 into two evenly played notes. Therefore, we can count them as: 5 &.