I wrote a tab I’m pretty proud of. The song is 林泉吟/Melodies of forest and springs by Raflum | 雨鎖悲秋:

Lovely Chinese neofolk

I don’t even remember how I found this album for sure. Probably a random youtube recommendation ages ago. It’s one I keep re-remembering and revisiting though.

The album primarily features layered classical guitar parts, but it isn’t really played like a classical guitar. The aesthetics feel very Chinese. Long slides sometimes remind me of something you’d hear played on a guqin. Occasionally, piano, bamboo flutes, violin, or vocal performance join in. All of the instrumentation is fairly low-fi, usually not much added other than some reverb. It sits on top of frequent nature ambience. The tides, flowing water, rain, thunder, wind, singing birds, and chattering crickets never feel overstated, and usually compliement what is being played well. It doesn’t have the same kind of saturation, but for me it scratches the same kind of itch as post-rock.

It’s not a band I’ve seen much of any discussion of on the internet (or at least the English speaking internet I know). They have a bandcamp page, and there’s been some rare blog or social media mentions, but that’s about it. Just finding tablature or even chord charts is pretty much out of the question. I’ve been working on building up skills to transcribe and arrange for a while now, so I decided to take a swing at it myself. I picked this one because it’s a solo, albeit fairly polyphonic, guitar.

Tablature

I wanted to have this posted somewhre public. Feel free to save a copy. Let me know if you like it. I might get around to uploading a performance somewhere eventually. I might also transcribe more of the album eventually, although the non-guitar parts will be much more challenging for me.