Billy Idol – Rebel Yell Guitar Lesson

In this Rebel Yell guitar lesson video, I will show you all of the guitar parts for this 80's hard rock classic from Billy Idol, note-for-note.

There is a lot of cool stuff that guitarist Steve Stevens throws at us in "Rebel Yell". The guitar solo even includes a toy ray-gun effect. 🙂

We will start the song with a a little fingerpicked technique that was probably originally recorded as two separate guitar parts. Steve Stevens played these parts together when performing live, so I will show you how to play it like that as well in this lesson. You can use fingerpicking or hybrid picking and I will show you both ways you can play it.

The riffs used throughout "Rebel Yell" move around quite a bit. I have done a lot of research to try and nail down exactly where on the fretboard Steve Stevens played the guitar parts on the original recording. These days, he seems to vary how he pays the parts quite a bit, so I focused mostly on older performance footage from around the time "Rebel Yell" was originally released.

Steve Stevens' guitar solo became an instant classic. Not only is it full of really cool guitar licks, but also includes the use of a toy ray-gun placed near the pickups. There isn't much you can do when that effect occurs. I simply do some fast muted strums to recreate the rhythmic effect of the toy ray-gun, but you can choose what you want to do there as well.

A little later in the song there is a cool repeated keyboard melody. I have decided to transcribe that for guitar as well since it is pretty easy to play and will sound great if you are performing the song and don't have a keyboard player in your band.

I hope you enjoy learning this hard rock classic from the 80's with tons of cool licks by the great Steve Stevens!

Carl...

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Billy Idol - Rebel Yell Guitar Lesson