(How) can you recognize which Beatle is playing? | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Plenty of fans have been fooled by who plays what.  Thanks to the internet, you can pretty much look up any song to see who is playing what on it.  Paul was a very unusual lead guitar player.  But best in small doses.  The more he’d solo, the more his limitations came out – but only in his solo work, he never took a long solo in a Beatles song.  In fact, only Clapton did that!

Something to know about George.  He would struggle often in the studio in the early years.  He could come up with some nice tasty licks in the early days on stage (and many of his solos were melodic and chord based), but in his own words, he played crappy guitars for rock lead (Gretsch) with lousy tone.  He simply was unaware!  He started getting better guitars more suited for the job like the blue Fender Strat (that became Rocky), a red Gibson SG, Epiphone Casino and later his Les Paul (Lucy) and the rosewood Fender Telecaster seen on Let It Be .  Certainly things had really come to a head on the Taxman session, where he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory solo so Paul ripped off a killer one in no time.  That had to be humiliating.  Here was a great song that he wrote, the lead off track of the album and he couldn’t deliver a solo while Paul’s was considered so good, they copied it and put it on the fade out as an encore.

When they recorded All You Need Is Love , John and Paul told George to play the solo live as they performed it.   George was a little concerned that he might mess it up.  Martin told him they’d be able to fix it later if he screwed up.  Sure enough, George messed up the end of the solo!  He hits that bad note and it simply ends.  They never fixed the solo and released it as is.  I always wondered what he was going to play, probably the same notes as the rest of the solo, but going up with the key change.  Either way, not a confidence booster.

In 1966 George really immersed himself in learning the sitar.  For two years he worked very hard at it.  He finally came to the realization that he was never going to be a great sitar player and gave it up completely in 1968 to go back to guitar.  But it was a blessing in disguise for him.  One, it had made him more rounded as a musician.  It gave him a new sense of musicality.  Two, he started playing slide guitar in 1969 with his own sound and style which is very rare for a slide player.  I have the sense that hearing similar slide type instruments in Indian music put that bug in his ear (similar to Derek Trucks).  His playing really took off.  He was coming up with some amazing solos.  Not flashy, not blues based, but melodic and musical.  Fast forward to the Something session.  George has written a masterpiece, everything is coming together on the track and they need to record the orchestra.  But George wants to record his solo at the same time as the orchestra.  George Martin reminds him that he has to nail it, they can’t keep re-doing it.  George does nail it as you hear it on the record (although it ended up being pretty similar to the one he already had recorded).  I also felt George played some great leads on the rooftop gig considering it was outside in January.  The bottom line is George truly evolved as a guitar player in the 60’s, coming out a great player as 1970 arrived.  On his first solo album his amazing slide work and lead guitar were everywhere.