I Feel My Savior's Love

Merry Christmas from Jason Booth!

Just in time for Christmas, Jason emailed me and offered this tab and video.  I think you'll agree that both are fantastic.  Here's the tab, and Jason's comments, both published with his  permission.  There's also a video of Jason playing the piece [HERE].  This arrangement is NOT in the Public Domain, but Jason has generously offered them to the blog.  Same rules apply as for my tabs.  Thank you, Jason.

Jason describes himself thus:  I'm a married, father of four, mechanical engineer, who loves all things guitar related.  I've been playing for about 17 years.  I've accompanied people in talent shows and at different church functions.  I just think the guitar is wonderful.  I actually am in the process of building my own acoustic guitar, but since I work on it when I'm not busy with my kids the process is a couple of years in the works so far.

I wrote a couple of paragraphs about playing the song.  That was harder than I thought it would be.  Let me know if something doesn't make sense.  Here they are:

The song is originally written in the key of F.  This arrangement is in the key of D, to get to F you just need to put a capo on the 3rd fret.  In my video I have the capo on the 2^nd fret because that’s the range that fit my daughter’s voice the best.  The tab is written for a guitar tuned to DADGBE, regular tuning with the low E string dropped to a D.  [This is often called, "drop D tuning"-- Don]

The song requires the use of the barred C-form chord.  Because the low string is dropped to a D it makes a couple of strange barred chords that take a bit of practice to be able to go to smoothly, like the G in measure 10 and the F#m in measure 11.  Because the song is finger picked you can cheat a little bit though.  You don’t have to have all of your fingers in place at the beginning of the measure, just the ones that are needed for the first note.  Then the fingers in place act as an anchor to help the others land in the correct position.  That’s the technique I use going from the D5 in measure 9 to the G in measure 10.  I make sure my 1st finger is on the 6th string at the 5th fret and my 3rd finger is on the 1st sting at the 7^th fret at the start of the measure then I have a whole extra beat to get my other two in place.  I do the same thing for the F#m in the 11^th measure.

I added a couple of beats to measures 13 and 17 to account for a couple of notes that are usually held longer by the person singing the song and I liked the way it sounded.  If you end up playing along with someone who is playing on the piano you’ll need to make some adjustments there. To start the song I play the end of the song starting on the last note of measure 13 as an intro.  I end the song with a slow strum of the full D chord, ending on the 2nd string, a D.