Beginner Guitar HQ. Despite a legendary career with the Beatles and as a solo artist, John Lennon remains underrated for his guitar playing skills. Over the course of his lifetime, Lennon established himself as one of the greatest rhythm guitar players in the history of the instrument. Even today, his body of work remains as energetic and dynamic as ever.

‘Get Back’ became a No. 1 hit in America for the band in May ’69.


Navigation menu
I am a beginning-intermediate guitar player and I was wondering if some of the more experienced guitar players on this site could help me out. I have always been fascinated with the sound of John's guitar and how he plays. I would like to know how to reproduce his sound. I play lefty and I use a Squier Strat. I know its not the most ideal but it was all I could find cheaply. If only Rickenbacker made southpaw s. I haven't paid much attention to John's rhythm guitar; I'm sure he was especially talented, but I just don't have enough interest to do the extra work of trying to find out who played what on which song and if I did, I probably wouldn't be that good at it , or going the extra mile to listen to isolated tracks etc.
George’s absence during the ‘Let It Be’ sessions led to John playing lead.
As their touring days wound down, they became a full-time studio band. Their scope of experimentation grew, as did the palette of sounds. This article attempts to list the instruments used to achieve those results. The resonant character of the full acoustic body, combined with the electric pickup, meant that this guitar was susceptible to feedback, employed to great effect on the intro to " I Feel Fine ". Lennon also used a Framus Hootenanny twelve-string acoustic , which can be seen in the movie Help! This twelve-string guitar accounted for audibly richer rhythm guitar parts on songs like these, in comparison to the six-string Gibsons. After Sgt. Harrison later gave the guitar to Bob Dylan in He purchased the guitar in Hamburg in its original natural finish and used the guitar extensively throughout the Cavern Club performances.
With that in mind, Guitar World decided to celebrate the 10 best guitar moments from the band's hit-making history. In assembling this list, we looked beyond our personal favorite songs and reflected on where John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney showed their talents as guitarists, whether in a solo, a riff, a technique or by their astute selection of instrument and arrangement. Ironically, while the Beatles were breaking apart in , George Harrison was coming into his own as a songwriter and guitarist. And of course he wrote these beautiful songs and we got a great new guitar sound. Lennon wrote the song for Yoko Ono, with whom he was newly in love, and the result is a spellbinding exercise in obsessive repetition, from its lyrics—consisting almost entirely of the title and roughly five other words—to the ominous guitar lines that recur throughout it. Few other artists could have made so much with so little. Rather than simply improvising guitar lines while the track was played backward, he prepared lead lines and a five-bar solo for the song and had George Martin transcribe them for him in reverse. Harrison then performed the lines while the tape was running back to front. This middle-period Beatles gem, written primarily by Lennon, features Harrison and McCartney on impeccably crafted and performed harmony-lead guitar melodies, a pop-rock arranging approach that was still in its infancy in