The wind that shakes the Barley is a traditional Irish reel in 2 sections, presented here for fingerstyle guitar
Traditional music has long provided material and inspiration for fingerstyle guitar arrangements in part due to the strong melodies and opportunity for trying out different harmonies.
If you’re new to traditional music it can be a bit bewildering as to where to find the tunes but a good place to start is the session.org, or check out the session tunes books at www.scotlandsmusic.com.
The best place to start when learning a tune is with the melody. They often have an A and B consisting of 8 bars each, and Ive found it useful to learn 2 bars then move onto the next 2 as there’s often a lot of repetition. The Wind that Shakes the Barley has a 4 bar A section, which is repeated. then an8 bar B section. You can see bars 1 and 3 of the first section are identical which helps a lot with getting the tune down.
The video below show the full arrangement played through twice in drop D tuning. The tab shows melody with basic harmony, then second time a little more rhythm and the final pass through has a more developed harmony with some passing chords as shown in the demo below.
This is just one approach to arranging and playing traditional music on fingerstyle guitar, and many different players have expertly come up with their own methods. A few players to check out are John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, Pierre Bensusan, Thomas Loeb, Tony McManus, Jen Butterworth and Anna Massie