How to play ‘The Last of Us’ fingerstyle version of Take On Me
Take On Me by A-ha is a one of the biggest global pop hits from the 1980s and has over 2 billion streams online. The synth based original is not guitar oriented but the song has been re-imagined as an acoustic fingerstyle ballad for the HBO hit series/Naughty Dog video game, “The Last of Us”. Reduced to a slow, simple finger-picked ballad, Take On Me becomes a beautiful song for acoustic guitar.
Chords: A Bm E D D2 F#m E7sus4 [creates the key of A Major]
Pick or Fingers? Finger picking is the best option, especially on acoustic guitars but Take On Me could easily be adapted to hybrid-picking (pick + ring finger) on electric guitar.
Acoustic or Electric? Ellie’s version in “The Last of Us” sounds perfect on unaccompanied acoustic. Simplicity is sometimes the best approach and this will sound great on both steel-string and nylon-string guitars.
Does Take On Me need a capo? : This depends on which version you are basing your own on. The TV version is in A Major and played simply on standard tuning with no capo but the video game version is a tone higher, in the key of B, an uncomfortable key for guitar players. If you want to play Take On Me in the key of B play this chart with the capo on at the 2nd fret.
How does the picking work? Above the top line you get a sample of which fingers to pick the arpeggios with. The letters p i m a are standard fingerpicking designations: p = thumb ; i = index finger ; m = middle ; a = ring finger
Relevant pages in Modern Guitar Chord Styles 1 : To learn more about the chords and techniques used in Take On Me go to pages 12-13, 17, 34 and 43 - 44.
Relevant pages in Modern Guitar Fingerstyle 1 : For more detailed finger picking work relevant to the arpeggio patterns in Take On Me see pages 6 - 8, 11, 14 - 15 and 32
Need a bit of help?
Modern Guitar Chord Styles 1 and Modern Guitar Fingerstyle 1 are excellent tutor books and perfect companions for our song guides. They teach you how to read the rhythm slash notation and the metric TAB used in our charts and are specially designed to train beginners to speed up their chord changes, master strumming and finger picking patterns, and many other techniques.
