City And Colour Guitar Tab

Playing City and Colour Songs on Guitar

Dallas Green's project City and Colour relies heavily on open tunings and fingerpicked patterns that look deceptively simple but hide some annoying friction points if you're not careful. Most of the catalog sits in DADGAD or similar hybrid tunings, and the chord shapes you see in standard notation don't always translate cleanly to your fretboard without adjustment.

City And Colour Guitar Tab

The most common place people find reliable tabs is on Songsterr and Ultimate Guitar. Songsterr tends to be more accurate for the fingerstyle parts because they show the tab scrolling with the track. Ultimate Guitar has better community corrections but the free tier skips measures on longer songs. I spent about three weeks reconciling discrepancies between the two platforms for "Sick Makes It So" before I just accepted that both had wrong fret numbers on the pre-chorus transition. The workaround was learning the chord progression by ear from the studio version and only using tabs as a structural reference rather than a literal map. That cut my practice time from about forty minutes per song down to maybe twelve.

The core issue most players hit is that the standard EADGBE tuning doesn't match what Dallas actually plays. His live setup usually involves capos at the second or fourth fret combined with alternate tunings like open D or DADGAD. If you're trying to play "Keep You" in the original key without adjusting your tuning or capo placement, it will sound wrong no matter how accurately you read the tab.

Common Tunings and Practical Approach

Open D tuning (D A D FA D) handles a lot of the later material. Open G (D G D G B D) covers some of the earlier records. The practical method is to put your capo on wherever makes the fretting hand comfortable and adjust the tuning underneath it. This lets you use familiar barre chord shapes while still hitting the right resonant frequencies.

I ran into a specific problem with "Light Years" where the tab showed a straight D major shape but the actual recording uses a drop-D flavor with the low string muted on certain strums. The fix was simply muting the sixth string with the palm of my picking hand and using a lighter touch on the downstrokes. Once I matched the dynamics to the recording instead of just playing the fret numbers correctly, it finally sounded right.

What Tabs Get Wrong Regularly

Chord diagrams in city and colour guitar tab are often missing the bass note movement. Dallas frequently walks the bass line between chord tones instead of holding a static root position shape. The tab will show a single chord symbol over a four-bar measure when the actual part moves through at least three different inversions. Learning this by ear is necessary unless you find very detailed transcriptions which are rare.

Another frequent error is the omission of hammer-ons and pull-offs in the fingerstyle passages. The tab will show a full fret number for every note when half of them are generated by left-hand technique rather than picked individually. This matters because it changes your right-hand approach entirely. Playing each note separately sounds stiff compared to the fluid sound of the original.

Learning Strategy

Start by identifying the tuning from the first chord shape rather than assuming standard tuning. Listen to the low end of the track to determine the root note and check whether the open strings ring out in harmony. Once you have the tuning locked in, learn the strumming or picking pattern before worrying about advanced voicings. The rhythmic feel carries most of these songs far more than technical accuracy on the fretboard.

The bottleneck for most people is transitioning between the verse and chorus sections because the chord voicings shift position on the neck without obvious visual markers. I solved this by marking specific fret positions on a notepad and practicing the transitions in isolation at half tempo before integrating them into the full song. It added maybe ten minutes to my initial practice sessions but prevented me from wasting hours trying to muscle through blind.

Where to Find Updated Tabs

Songsterr remains the most reliable source for scrolling tabs with tempo control. The community notes section there often has corrected versions posted when the official transcription is wrong. Ultimate Guitar Pro subscriptions include timing metadata that makes verification faster. For the rare tracks that lack any published tab, the album liner notes sometimes list tuning information which saves considerable guesswork.

Dallas occasionally changes arrangements between studio recordings and live performances, so a tab from a live bootleg might not match the studio version you're trying to learn. I learned this the hard way after spending an afternoon on "Breathe into Me" only to realize the live version uses a completely different harmonic structure in the bridge. The studio album version is the safer reference point if you're not playing a live set.