Heaven Passing Through

About This Lesson

In this lesson I’ll teach you how to play Heaven Passing Through by Turnpike Troubadours, which features a beautiful fingerstyle guitar arrangement. I’ll begin by teaching you the verse & chorus chords, to give you an overview of the song’s structure — with some strumming tips included. From there, I’ll dive into the fingerstyle used in the intro & verse, giving you a step-by-step sequence of the exercises I used to build up to the full arrangement (tabs included). Be sure to check out my bonus video below, where I show the process of transcribing this song to the Key of G (which suits my singing voice better). Good luck and enjoy!

• 0:00 Welcome
• 0:43 Chords & Strumming
• 3:30 Fingerstyle: Overview
• 4:13 Fingerstyle: Step 1
• 6:03 Fingerstyle: Step 2
• 7:26 Fingerstyle: Step 3
• 9:10 Fingerstyle: Step 4
• 12:08 Fingerstyle: Step 5
• 15:25 Chorus Fingerstyle
• 16:36 Interlude & Ending
• 17:45 Full Playthrough

Quick Links

• Official Album Recording on YouTube
• Song Overview from Holler
• Lyric & chords in Key of C, as TT plays it
• Lyric & chords in Key of G, for lower voices

Practice Notes 3 pages

Lesson Discussion

Bonus - Transposing to Key of G

When playing this song in its original key, I’m not able to sing the high notes that Evan Felker hits (his vocal range goes higher than mine). So, I put together this additional bonus video where I show the process of transposing the song to a different key. This allows me to hit high notes that are at the upper end of my range, but importantly not too high. This creates a much more satisfying experience of me playing this beautiful song.

Note, I’m using the Easy Drop-D Capo Trick to pull this off… where my guitar stays in standard tuning, but my capo is applied to the 2nd fret on all but the thickest strings. This enables me to play a D major chord with all six strings (000232) while the G and C stay the same (320003 and x32010, respectively). Just note, you’ll need to use the 4th string for the E minor bass note (xx2000) because of this capo quirk.

Step-by-Step Fingerstyle Exercises

Here’s clipped videos (from my main lesson above) of the suggested exercises I recommend using the work up to the full fingerpicking riff used in the intro & verse of this song. These are the exact steps I took to learn this myself! When you dive into these, spend as much time on each exercise as necessary until it’s truly under your belt (i.e. you can play it with confidence, without any mistakes). Then move on to the next exercise. Rinse & repeat… and remember to take things slow! The only pre-requisite here is to learn the chord shapes, and being generally familiar with Travis-style fingerpicking is helpful too.

Exercise 1 - Bass Notes Only

Exercise 2 - Add a Single Filler Note (Just After the “1” Count)

Exercise 3 - Adding Constant Filler Notes (Isolating Each Chord)

Exercise 4 - Adding Constant Filler Notes (Following the Exact Progression)

Exercise 5 - The Final Version (How Evan Felker Plays It)

Official Lyric Video from Turnpike Troubadours

Need to reference the album recording of this song, with lyrics? Here you go! Such great stuff, I wish I could sing like Evan. It took me many lessons (and forum posts) to realize this, but I love how verse 1 = child’s point of view; verse 2 = young love; verse 3 = parent’s point of view. The fact that verse 1 & 3 are vaguely the same situation, just from different points of view, is quite amazing!

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