Free Ride By Nick Drake

"Free Ride" was originally played by Nick Drake in the, I guess, CGCFCE tuning. As I didn't want to totaly retune my guitar on stage or in the studio for every song I choose an easier tuning which became, after some experimentation, this one: D B D G B E

Just tune the A string to B and the lower the E string to D I came up with the folowing intro and re-harmonization of this beautiful tune.

Mind your steps with the 5/8 bar!

Intro

Theme

I reharmonized the melody in the first part in sixths or fourths over an open B string drone and, as I wanted to avoid big stretches in the second part, the 6th string was retuned to D so that I could play the F# on the 4th fret. I have written the lyrics of the first verse under the tabs.

Improvisation

I improvised over the folowing repeated picking pattern in B

Then I used a small middle part to make my solo interesting which was something like this:

Here's a fragment of the solo I did using an Eastern flavored scale.

Have fun.