Getting Fleetwood Mac Little Lies Sheet Music In A Major Right
The song sits in Gminor on the original recording, which means the vocal melody is accessible but the chord shapes are awkward for most guitarists and pianists. Transposing to A Major changes the harmony slightly because the modal character shifts when you move up a half step, but it gives you real G-major shapes instead of those sharp-heavy bar chords. Here is what you actually need to know when you put the music down on paper or screen. The main verse progression in A Major is Amaj7 – Em7 – Dmaj7 – B7. Then it moves to C – F7 – Amaj7 – E7 for the turnaround before coming back to the verse. The chorus opens on Amaj7 and Dmaj7 with a descending C#m7 to B7 movement that gives the whole thing its ache. The bridge is where it gets interesting musically. It centers on Am7 – G – C – F7, which pulls you out of pure A Major territory and into modal mixture. That F7 is the whole mood of the song. If you smooth that out or try to force it into A Major diatonic chords, you lose what makes the tune work. I spent two weeks trying to get a clean transcription of this for a gig where the singer needed it in A Major. The first pass I wrote had the chorus resolving to Dmaj7 when it should resolve to Amaj7. My ears told me something was wrong but my hands were still following the original key on the fretboard, and that is exactly where the confusion sets in. Once I switched to reading the chord chart instead of relying on muscle memory from the recording, the voicings clicked. The turnaround always comes back to the Amaj7, not the Dmaj7. That single mistake threw the entire chord loop out of place.
The piano part is the trickiest element to notate. It is mostly arpeggiated figures played with a light touch across the upper register. The left hand holds the root or fifth while the right hand outlines the seventh chord in a rolling pattern. A common notation choice is to write this as broken chords with eighth-note triplet grouping, but the original feel is closer to straight eighths with a very loose rubato. If you are writing sheet music for someone to play from, use standard notation with the arpeggios clearly beamed. Tab alone will make the rhythm feel stiff and mechanical, which is the opposite of how this song should sit. One thing people consistently get wrong on the bridge is the C chord voicing. The original recording has that C as a Cmaj7 sound, not a plain triad. When I see sheet music that notates it as C without the seventh, the player usually lands on a harsh G natural that clashes with the F7 coming next. Marking it Cmaj7 or even C6 at that point lets the harmony breathe properly before the descent into F7. The F7 itself should be voiced with the third and seventh clearly present. You need the E natural and the D to make the pull back to Amaj7 feel earned rather than sudden. For the vocal line, the melody in A Major starts on the fifth degree (E) and mostly stays in the middle register. The range goes from roughly A3 to E5 in this key. If you are transposing for a male voice, you might drop to G Major, which puts the range around G3 to D5. The harmony vocals on the original track are stacked thirds and sixths above the lead, so any sheet music you produce should indicate those doubles if the arrangement calls for them. The bridge vocal enters on the same melodic contour but with different lyrics, and the harmony here shifts to parallel motion that moves stepwise rather than leaping. Notating this as separate staves instead of inline chords prevents confusion when someone is trying to sing and play at the same time.
The tempo mark should say something around 72 to 76 beats per minute. Anything faster and the arpeggios start to blur together, and anything slower and the chord changes feel dragged out. The original recording uses a slight push-pull on the tempo throughout, so marking it strictly at one number is not entirely accurate, but it gives players a stable reference point. There is a bottleneck with this arrangement that you should be aware of. If you are strictly in A Major and you try to play the bridge without any alteration, the C to F7 movement will sound like you modulated without warning. The F7 does not belong in A Major naturally. You can address this by adding a slash chord notation like C/G leading into F7, which shows the bass movement and signals to the player that a non-diatonic chord is entering the picture. Without that indication, someone reading the sheet music blind might try to substitute Fmaj7 or Am7 and completely change the harmonic direction of the passage. If you need an actual sheet music file, the transcription I referenced here is something I built from scratch after cross-referencing the recording with a few existing online charts, most of which had errors in the chorus turnaround. I recommend checking your work against the audio track at least once, particularly around bar 17 where the F7 arrives, because that is where nearly every amateur transcription goes wrong. The chord is easy to mishear as Fmaj7 if you are not listening carefully to the lowering of the third from Fto F natural.
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