Soulful Lead Guitar with "America the Beautiful"

Lesson #540 • Feb 16, 2024

In today’s lesson I’m excited to show a few lead guitar approaches you can apply to America the Beautiful. In my main lesson (above) I’ll show you an acoustic approach, where I’ll add melody notes to simple strums of chords — all in open position. This makes for a very accessible way to get started with things, as you can adjust the dials on the melody notes or strumming to suit your taste. This one is a lot of fun, let’s get into it!

0:00 Lesson Overview
2:17 Song Structure
4:11 Line 1 of 4
6:58 Line 2 of 4
8:39 Line 3 of 4
10:20 Line 4 of 4
11:33 Fingerstyle Options
12:28 Playthrough w/ Jam Track

Instructional PDF 3 pages

Lesson Discussion

Bonus Videos

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Part 2 - Up the Neck on the Electric Guitar

In this video I’ll teach you play these same melody notes, but using a scale position that’s up the neck (frets 7-10). I’m using my electric guitar for this one, with a bit of overdrive applied – and I’m sticking 100% to individual melody notes. No strummed chords.

Zoomed Playthrough - Acoustic

Zoomed Playthrough - Electric

Practice Track

Here’s a play-along video track you can play over while practicing. This has organ, bass, and drums playing through the 16 measure sequence, on repeat… with a highlight on-screen so you always know which chord is being played at any given moment. It’s a lot of fun to use and incredibly helpful!

I also have an audio version of this practice track, which you can download and save for offline use.

Post Malone’s Super Bowl LVIII Performance

Finally, here’s the video that inspired this lesson. Post Malone performed this song at Super Bowl 58. I intially thought I would learn it exactly how he’s playing it. But plans change! My fingerpicking approach ebbed and flowed, eventually leading to the acoustic version in my main video lesson (which itself evolved into the electric guitar approach I show in “Part 2”).

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Soulful Lead Guitar with "America the Beautiful"

Instructional PDF 3 pages

Lesson Discussion

Bonus Videos