After all the serious music we've looked at recently, let's lighten things up with this merry little ditty. The Axel F tune was originally written for the Beverly Hills Cop movie by Harold Faltermeyer on keyboards. Love it or hate it, one thing's for sure - it sticks in your head. This makes it a good practice tune. The tune has been re-mixed over the years, the most well known version being the Crazy Frog tune. Here we show a guitar transposition for that version.

Main Tune - This is the main melody. It is quite short and uses notes from the F natural minor scale. The tricky thing about playing it on guitar is that you need to sometimes barre your finger across 2 notes to quickly jump between them - like here, here and here.

This involves 'preparing' fingers on adjacent strings. Just apply pressure to the note you are playing, and release pressure from the note being held on the adjacent string. Even just a small release of pressure will mute the string. This is a very common trick used by guitarists. It takes some practice, but once you get the hang of it you don't need to use separate fingers for each individual note. Barring notes the way we show here is more practical and faster.

End the main riff by stabbing this F major chord.

Chorus - Although only a few chords are used here, it's tricky due to the speed of chord changes. You may wish to use thumb-muting (curl your thumb over the fretboard to mute the lower strings) as this will help eliminate string noise. All the chords here are played along the highest 3 / 4 strings. The chords are best divided into 2 sections:

1. The first progression is the hardest: F major - Eb major - Bb maj / sus4 - F major - Eb major - Bb major - F major

2. Much easier: Db major - slide to - Eb major. Then play F major - drop down 2 frets and slide up to - F major again.

The song is played fast and is more tricky than it sounds, but this just means you should slow way down to practice at first, build speed only once your fingers know their way. It's a great tune for helping you develop string control and timing. The melody is strong, which always helps when learning because you can identify mistakes more clearly.