Music and Songwriting/The Songwriter's Grooves Project - A Guide to Singing and Playing Guitar/The Looping Song Series/Sing - Ed Sheeran

Sing - Ed Sheeran
Introductory Lesson Link

This song has been performed live by Ed mostly with minimal looping, but it's a soul-style song with a heavily looping-influenced structure.In these lessons we'll learn the various riffs used in the song so that you can make a solo arrangement or a fully-featured loop arrangement.

History
As the lead single on Ed's second album, it was probably intended to get the album with a strong out-of-the-gate sense of momentum. Despite being obviously designed for crowd participation, it was totally eclipsed by "Thinking Out Loud" in commercial success. Nevertheless, it's a fun song and an excellent vehicle to learn some looping techniques.

Flagship Recordings/Performances
Official Music Video - Although the loop structure of the song is very consistent, Ed rarely performs all the parts in the record version. Electric guitars and bass, a few acoustic overdubs and aux percussion are some notable sounds in the mix.

Live at the BBC music awards 2014 - This performance is pretty typical for this song. Ed's live performances of this song have relatively few variations and usually use the parts seen in this performance.

Playing tips
This song can actually by studied from a lot of angles of guitar technique, which is ironic for a drinking song, but apt if you're trying to impress smart people at parties ;-)

The opening riff is a really easy way to teach basic mute strumming, especially if done with Am - Dm on a ukulele. It's a fairly easy intro to faster funk strumming techniques on guitar, especially if played with a capo. Played as a looping song, it can be done fairly simply or with a lot of layers of complexity depending on how many parts you try to integrate. That being said, it works with a number of different arrangements and can be done very well with just the voice and the guitar in a loop pedal/station. Just having the percussive layers in a single track pedal can go a long way, but you can also stack vocals and bunch of guitar parts if you have a two or three track loop station. More than three tracks might not do you a lot of good with normal arrangements, but the sky is the limit if you're doing your own arrangement!

Basic - Strumming Lesson
Video Link

Tab Link

Lesson Notes
There are a few basic strumming patterns in this song, and all come out of the Funk/Soul vocabulary. It's absolutely key to remember to keep your strokes in a strict up and down groove or it will get really hard to stay in time. The first thing it's good to do is warn up with just simple up-and-down muted strokes at both 8th and 16th note beats. You'll also want to accent 2 and 4. The goal tempo for this is 120. All strokes are muted.

1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n

d u D u d u D u

Then double the speed if the strumming to 16th notes

1ena2ena3ena4ena

duduDudududuDudu

Once you've got your hands in the groove using those techniques, try going to the tab and working those patterns over the chords.

Intermediate - Looping Lesson
Video Link

Tab Link

Advanced
Video Link

Tab Link

Lesson Notes
In this lesson I'll go over a way to perform all the parts on the recorded album version with a looper. Ed doesn't tend to play all these parts live because it's somewhat unwieldy due to the 8 bar length of the loop. If a few clever techniques are used though, you can keep the arrangement moving nicely, though it definitely requires very precise timing and knowing the arrangement quite well because if you miss a transition it will take 8 bars to get it back, which is kinda long.

This first thing to know is that Ed has an affinity for loop stacking. For most of his early looping days he had a one track looper and it wasn't until near the release of the album 'X' that he got his Chewie Monsta to do dense multi-track looping. This particular arrangement we're going to need something with at least two tracks and an undo/redo function. If you're using a two-track looper you'll need to make all the tracks synced at 8 bars long, so it'll take a while to set up the loop. A slightly better situation would be to have a 3-track looper with the percussion on track 1 on a short loop that isn't synced with the long loop. It'll get the song going much faster. I also recommend bypassing the vocals from the looper and doing the percussion with just a guitar so you can move the arrangement along faster. You could also do this with a signal routing switch if you are set up to do it and you'd prefer to beatbox the percussion.

Song Stats
Notable techniques

Original Key

Tempo

Tuning

Key fingering

SWG Level/Sequences

Practice logs
Player Name

Previous Experience

Current Playing Level of the Song

Minutes in Practice Room

Link to Song Performance

sequence links