Fingerstyle Guitar Challenge: Korobeiniki (The Tetris Theme Tune)

In this musical challenge, I took on learning a fingerstyle guitar arrangement of Korobeiniki, better known as the theme tune from the video game Tetris. Korobeiniki is a nineteenth century Russian folk song. It has a distinctly Russian melody. It starts slowly and gains tempo in a certain way that I associate with Eastern European traditional dance music (You can almost hear slowly building claps and “Opa!”).

Tetris is one of the most iconic video games of all time. This song was used in the Nintendo Game Boy version of the game. The Game Boy version of the game is one of the best-selling video games of all time, and it is credited with popularizing the console. I’ve never played the Game Boy version of Tetris, but I still recognized this song as “the Tetris theme”, which shows its reach.

The arrangement of the song I learned is from the excellent Youtube channel Sky Guitar. Sky Guitar has hundreds of lessons and tabs of fingerstyle guitar arrangements. These songs are kind of like piano arrangements where an entire song, from the bass notes to the melody, is played with one guitar all at once. The videos are extremely succinct, with no talking (and no face of the instructor). They simply demonstrate a slow version of the tab with a metronome and provide tips for finger placements. They also play through the song at its actual tempo.

I love that they rate the songs on a difficulty scale that they include in the thumbnails. They have playlists from 1 star songs for beginners up to 5 star songs that are expert level difficulty. Korobeiniki is a 2 star difficulty arrangement according to Sky Guitar, which I found kind of shocking, because it took an enormous amount of effort for me to learn it. I can’t imagine how difficult 5 star songs are to learn.

To learn this arrangement, I broke the song down into sub parts and memorized the tab for each part bit by bit. Even the slow parts were difficult in the beginning. I just kept practicing over and over until it became comfortable and eventually was locked into my memory. The fast parts took a ton of patience to learn. I learned them at a slow tempo, paying attention to every single note. I made attempts to bring it up to speed and would hit strings unintentionally, miss the correct timing trying to grip some awkward chord quickly, would mute notes with fingers that were barely holding strings. I just kept at it though and tried to get faster and faster over time with patience.

This arrangement of Korobeiniki has parts that I am still trying to nail down. It starts slowly and then gains tons of speed, so getting down the tempo can be confusing. Its melody loops but with plenty of differences between the parts, which confused me quite often. I had to keep looking up the tab to make sure I was playing the right versions at the right time. The arrangement requires you to go quickly from a blazingly fast part at the top of the guitar neck to a fast part at the bottom of the guitar neck and back again. Being a fingerstyle arrangement, you have to play both the bass parts and the melody at the same time. I had some difficultly paying attention to the bass parts while trying to play both the bass and melody. It’s still hard for me to listen to the bass to make sure that it is timed correctly without messing up the melody. This arrangement of the song involves the pinky finger a lot too, so I had to practice getting it more coordinated to get to this level of guitar playing.

The part at the bottom of the neck with really high notes gave me the most trouble. I had a tough time getting all the notes to ring out as I switched the chords that I arpeggiated. My pinky ended up muting the other strings a lot of the time as I quickly tried to grip the strings and change positions. It was tough to learn how to get set up with the first chord that is played at the bottom of the neck quickly after playing at the top of the neck. I had to practice that transition hundreds of times. That same chord is required in another part and it required a fast transition as well that took a lot of practice. I have built up a callus on my pinky finger after learning this song.

A large portion of this arrangement has you holding down an A minor chord and moving your index and pinky fingers to play the melody. This makes it feel quite comfortable for those parts. It is easy for me to get in a rhythm when I don’t have to move my hand around so much. The part at the bottom of the neck of the guitar also had some arpeggiated chords that gave me that satisfying sense of being locked into a rhythm. Other parts required more concentration as I had to move my hand and fingers around a lot more. Here is a video of me playing through the song:

Overall, this was a tough challenge for me. I still don’t have it totally down. This song is apparently only a 2 on Sky Guitar’s difficulty scale (out of 5), which I find hard to believe. It required so much concentration and practice for me to learn. I had to play it hundreds, maybe thousands of times to memorize it and make it muscle memory. Even now though I still mess up most of the time. I had to film dozens of times to get one take where I played without a major mistake that sent me off the rails. I am glad that I took this on though. Challenges that are a jump in difficulty are where you truly learn and level up if you can persevere through the discomfort. After putting this much effort into a “2 star” song, I have a new level of respect for musicians who are experts at their instruments.