Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds Guitar Lesson – The Beatles

The incredible Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album by The Beatles contains many tracks that not only break new ground in popular music but also contain mellow dream like sounds and textures.

One of the most popular "trippy" songs on the album is definitely "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

In this Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds guitar lesson video I will break down every section of this classic Beatles song note-for-note. In order to accomplish this I needed to create my own transcription since much of the song is not played on the guitar.

But if you watch and learn this entire video lesson you will see that all the parts are there recreated on guitar and it sounds great!

Written primarily by John Lennon but credited to Lennon/McCartney, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is unique not only for it's instrumentation, but also it's key structure.

The song modulates from one distant key to another moving from A major in the verse to Bb major in the pre-chorus to G in the chorus. Somehow they still make it all work within this psychedelic masterpiece.

The intro and verse may require a little bit of left hand coordination relatively high up the guitar fretboard, but that is required to recreate the slow harpsichord esque arpeggios.

From there we have the slide part in the pre-chorus which can be played with or without a slide, followed by the chorus in which I show you how to play the original guitar part then how to do a full arrangement of the chorus in order to sound more like the album.

The chorus will probably be the most difficult section of the song to learn even though I still don't think it will give you much trouble. I would estimate that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" would be a great guitar lesson to study for any lower intermediate player and above.

So I hope you enjoy the lesson. I certainly love teaching The Beatles!

Carl...

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Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds Guitar Lesson