Monochrome - Mumford & Sons

Hello everyone and welcome to this first tutorial for a song by Mumford & Sons: Monochrome! It's the only fingerstyle piece from their latest album Rushmere.

The original track features two guitars, but as always in these cases, I’ve tried to offer you the most complete arrangement possible to play it with just one guitar.

Moving on to the hands: starting with the right hand, as you can see, the picking pattern mostly follows the classic thumb–index–thumb–middle sequence. The index finger is used for the third string, the middle finger for the first and second strings, and the thumb covers the three bass strings. In my opinion, there are quite a few ghost notes throughout the song, although they’re not very clear when listening to the studio version. I play all the notes for you in the tutorial, and then you can decide which ones to mute or "ghost" based on your preference. The same goes for some of the notes on the first string. Occasionally, you might hear some high F notes, but I believe those are played by the second guitar. Again, it's up to you whether you want to include them or not.

As for the left hand, the index finger needs to stay pressed on the first fret of the second string for almost the entire song, except for a couple of chord changes. The most challenging part is definitely the chorus, where you'll have to stretch your pinky to reach the G# on the sixth string while the other fingers continue holding an A minor chord. I personally think that little progression from A to F (with F as the bass note) is just beautiful. Verses and the bridge sections shouldn’t cause you too many problems.

As always, you can find the tabs on my Patreon page. Have fun learning!