Juno – Sabrina Carpenter – Fingerstyle Guitar Arrangement
This is my second Sabrina Carpenter fingerstyle guitar cover, this time of the song ‘Juno’ from the hugely popular 2024 ‘Short n' Sweet’ album. Juno isn’t one of the very big hits from the album, but I wanted to do an original arrangement and figured that this song probably hadn’t already been covered for fingerstyle guitar. It’s also my favourite song from the album beyond ‘Please Please Please’ (which I already covered) and ‘Espresso’.
It is a challenging song to arrange for solo instrumental guitar, mainly because there is quite a lot going on in the rhythm section. Due to this, I focussed in on the vocal melody and tried to include as much detail from that as possible, whilst mainly keeping a steady rhythm going with the right hand throughout. The chords and structure of this arrangement are the same as the original song, with the only notable exception of the ending.
Juno is also in an awkward key for fingerstyle guitar, F major. To get round this, I simply tuned the guitar up a whole semitone, meaning that it is then played as though it is E major. This then keeps the song in the original key whilst allowing the use of open chord positions and open strings.
I didn’t use a metronome, so the tempo fluctuates slightly throughout as well. Overall, I ended up playing it a few clicks slower than the original song. Although this wasn’t intentional, I think I went this way because otherwise it would have felt a bit rushed trying to play it at the original tempo (on the grid as it were), especially with the half note driving bass part throughout the original song.