In Bloom Guitar Lesson – Nirvana


In this lesson we will take a look at Nirvana's catchy hard rock hit "In Bloom".

As with a lot of Nirvana songs, "In Bloom" rotates between between clean guitar verses and huge distortion laden chorus sections.

With this In Bloom guitar lesson, I will show you all of those chords and progressions and also do a note-for-note breakdown of the guitar solo.

The song starts with a powerful series of power chords that include a quick little ascending bass line. Playing that bass line in time and being able to quickly shift back to the first chord in the riff can be a bit tricky.

From there we launch into the main riff of the song which contains simple power chords played in a bit of a laid back style.

The chorus of In Bloom rotates between just two chords for the entire first half, making it the easiest part of the song to play by far.

The main part you will probably have to focus on in this In Bloom guitar lesson is the guitar solo.

The guitar solo starts our with some huge sounding and dissonant chords that are being brought in and out of tune at random. The key here is just to hold the chord and start playing with reckless abandon. Nothing is very precise here and it isn't meant to be either.

After those chords, we finally reach a discernible melody with a lick based out of the minor pentatonic scale. Then all of a sudden we are back to those dissonant chords!

The solo concludes with a slippery little lick that ascends on the G string, an oblique bend, then some chromatic tri-tones. Yikes!!

You can tell that Kurt Cobain was going for a very in your face quality with this solo, which may also make it quite hard to exactly replicate. I assure you he never played it the exact same way twice either. So don't worry about getting it note-for-note. Just learn the notes and chords and just go for it.

Have fun!

Carl...

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In Bloom Guitar Lesson - Nirvana

3 Comments

  1. Diesel Trowbridge on March 1, 2015 at 4:20 pm

    Carl,
    Those bends kind of drove you crazy while learn the solo right?

  2. Diesel Trowbridge on April 14, 2015 at 5:41 pm

    Carl,
    I would like to request a lesson on the solo of Drown in You by Daughtry.

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