Smooth Sailing

This is a fitting piece for ending your school year and heading into summer. Hearing this music, one can imagine relaxing on the deck of a large sailboat. A steady wind pushes you along with the rolling waves. The smell of saltwater is in the air. Skies are perfectly blue, except for the occasional puffy white cloud happily drifting off toward the horizon. Sounds nice, doesn't it?

"Smooth Sailing" is an easygoing piece for two recorders and beginning guitar. It's in 3/4 time and the tempo is moderate with the quarter note at 106. The recorder parts are supported by mandolin and accordion in the accompaniment. The recorders work nicely as a duet, but you don't have to use them together if you'd prefer to focus on just one or the other. The guitar part is also optional.

Both recorder parts employ a relatively wider range of notes. Recorder 1 has F#, G, A, B, C, D and recorder 2 uses low D, E, F#, G, A, B. If the F# is new to your recorder players, you may first want to check out "Taking Flight" (Music K-8, Vol. 36, No. 4) which has a recorder part that uses a more limited set of notes: F#, G, and A. The guitar part uses four chords: G, C, D7, and Emi. You'll see our music shows 4-string diagrams for each of these chords, but if you prefer to teach the full 6-string chords instead, please do!

If you'd like to follow along with the score, a PDF is available online. For ease in duplication, we have also provided PDFs of the individual guitar and recorder parts.