Hello everyone

Following my tutorial on the Lianne La Havas song “Age”, I thought I’d follow up with another beautiful song of her’s called “No Room For Doubt”.  Here’s her spellbinding performance on Jools Holland a few months ago:

The technique for this song is along the same lines as “Age” – fingerstyle with a jazzy rolled off treble tone.  Preferably using a guitar with humbuckers like Lianne’s.  For me, my strat with the tone rolled off was a good approximation.

Perhaps the trickiest part of the guitar part for this song is to get the right hand technique going, with the thumb and fingers working separately.  I found it easiest to practise the harmony parts separately from the bass (see beginning of my video below), and then piece them together starting off slowly and gradually building up speed.  Once you have this flowing then it’s simply a case of following the chord sequence and keeping that syncopated bass going underneath the three note repeated chords.

Chord sequence for the opening and verse is as follows:

Fig 1

|| : Fm/Ab-C – - – | Gm/Bb-D-Eb-D – - – | Fm/Ab-C – - – | Fm/Ab-C – - – : ||

The main chord is before the forward slash, with the bass notes after the forward slash, which makes this basically Fm to Gm, but with inversions.  At the end of the fourth repeat of the above sequence, the final two bars are as follows:

Fig 2

“…the right thing to do…”

|| Fm7 Fm7/C – - | Bb7 Bb7/G – - ||

These are the standard minor 7th and 7th chord shapes in the E barre position (I’m referring to the CAGED system here, if you want to look that up), with the same rhythmic figure in the right hand.

We then go into the chorus:

Fig 3

“We all make mistakes…”

|| : Fm/Ab-C – - – | Gm7 Gm7/D – - | Fm7 Fm7/C – - | Bb7 Bb7/G – - : ||

That sequence is played twice, and we are then back to the second verse (Fig 1) but this time it stops on a C7 chord at the beginning of the last bar of Fig 2 (lyrics are “you’re within”).  This is followed by the chorus (Fig 3) but there is an extra bar of C7 at the end.

We then have a bridge section over a slightly different chord sequence:

Fig 4

“Please sleep softly…”

First time:

|| Cm7 Cm7/G – - | Ab Ab/Eb – - | Gm7 Gm7/D Bb7 Bb7/F | Cm7 Cm7/G – - | Ab Ab/Eb – - | Gm7 Gm7/D Fm7 Fm7/C ||

Second time:

|| Cm7 Cm7/G – - | Ab Ab/Eb – - | Gm7 Gm7/D Bb7 Bb7/F | Cm7 Cm7/G – - | Ab Ab/Eb – - | Gm7 Gm7/D – - | Gm7 Gm7/D – Gbm7 | Fm7 Fm7/C – - | Bb7 – - – ||

After this, we’re back to the chorus (Fig 3), followed by a reprise of the bridge as an outro (Fig 4 – first time only) which ends on a Cminor chord (8th fret).

Here’s my tutorial video:

Enjoy!

Luke