Fleetwood Mac – Landslide Guitar Lesson


In this acoustic guitar lesson I will show you how to play the finger-picked Fleetwood Mac classic "Landslide".

Guitarist Lindsey Buckingham has long been recognized for his incredible fingerstyle guitar technique and his work in "Landslide" is no exception.

In this Landslide guitar lesson, I will demonstrate how to play the main acoustic fingerstyle part to this Fleetwood Mac classic.

The tuning for "Landslide" will be standard tuning with a capo at the 3rd fret. Any fret numbers I mention in the video lesson will be referring to that number of frets above the capo. So essentially just treat the capo as the zero fret.

There are actually a few guitar layers going on during "Landslide", but I am sticking with the essential parts in this lesson so it will sound great with just one guitar.

For the entire song Lindsey Buckingham employs the technique of Travis Picking. There are also many songs on GuitarLessons365 that use this picking technique. Check out my Travis Picking Lesson for more information of how to do this method of fingerstyle picking.

After you get the fingerpicking pattern in your hands, you will basically need to just learn the different chord progressions in order to play the entire song.

The verse uses a short 4 chord progression but is broken up every once in a while with a short pause on the A minor 7th chord. Make sure you know the sound of the song very well and you shouldn't have much trouble figuring out when these short pauses occur.

For the chorus we have a lot more going on both with the amount of chords in the progression and the extra embellishments that are thrown into the chords. These embellishments vary each time around, but in the lesson I will demonstrate a nice a relatively consistent way to approach them.

The main focus throughout all of these guitar parts for "Landslide" is in the consistent Travis Picking pattern. If you can keep this pattern going smoothly, and can play all the chords in time, you will sound great no matter what embellishments you may or may not add to the chords. 🙂

So I hope this song will give you a nice challenge and also a great song to play at the end of it!

Carl...

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Landslide Guitar Lesson - Fleetwood Mac

6 Comments

  1. Christopher Gonzalez on August 13, 2015 at 6:29 pm

    Hey Carl! Great lesson! Do you think you can teach Remember When by Alan Jackson? Thanks alot!

    Chris

  2. Pamela Baker on January 14, 2016 at 2:18 pm

    Do you know how to play/teach the Landslide solo part? I have watched a few videos on Youtube, however they are hard to see the exact chords/strumming. I was saw your version of Landslide last night…you are an excellent teacher. Went slow…and showed EXACTLY WHERE TO PLACE EACH FINGER…AND WHAT STRING/BOTH HANDS!! I WILL CERTAINLY LEAVE A DONATION – THIS IS MY NEW FAVORITE SITE! So, Landslide solo…and you do it?

  3. Emma Casey on February 12, 2016 at 3:48 pm

    ^ I have also tried to learn the solo but the videos are confusing. It would be great if you could teach it. Thanks for being such a great teacher! I have learned so much.

  4. John Dronenburg on February 2, 2017 at 6:17 am

    Best teacher on the world wide interweb!! I would greatly appreciate a landslide solo lesson. As the others have stated, other solo lessons for this song are subpar at best.
    Thanks

    Your student for life
    John

  5. Andy von Gremp on April 26, 2017 at 8:12 pm

    Carl, please do a lesson on “Sara” by Fleetwood Mac. It’s such a beautiful song. Thanks.

  6. Andy McLean on June 16, 2021 at 4:56 pm

    Stellar lesson Carl and a wake up call when I realised for years I’d been simultaneously pinching the A and B string to start the main riff. Now I know why it always sounded NQR.

    If anyone one wants to be further inspired by Carl’s lesson, here’s a clip from an old Letterman show for some icing on the cake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSwyhc4gA3k

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