Below is the lesson for “La Vie en rose”.

Helpful Tips

“La Vie en rose” is a timeless love song which needs no introduction. The key word in that opening sentence is ‘love’. You want to approach performing this piece with the emotion of love radiating throughout. Which leads us to the obvious question… how?

Begin by learning and memorizing the arrangement. The tricky elements from a technical standpoint is that it jumps around (up and down the neck) a lot, but is also barre chord heavy. When you feel comfortable performing the piece, you want to start thinking about how you are playing it.

With love songs, we want to use a light touch. If you watch Matt’s performance, you’ll notice that he uses his thumb to fingerpick the majority of the song. The thumb produces a softer, sweeter tone than the fingers.

Another area you can focus on is increasing the sustain of the notes and chords. Again, if you listen to Matt’s performance, you’ll hear that every note and chord rings into the next one; creating a beautiful, flowing sound.

A stylistic approach you can experiment with is, rubato. This means that we do not have to strictly adhere to a steady tempo. By altering the tempo, we can create more emotion in certain parts of the music. For example, the last two chords in measure 19 resolves the climax of the piece. Listen to Matt’s performance and you’ll hear how time slows down significantly for these two chords. This slowing down of time helps to strengthen and symbolize the end of the climax.

Part 1 – Performance & Free Lesson

Tab Play Along