Easy Fleetwood Mac Guitar Songs

Getting Started with Fleetwood Mac on Guitar

Fleetwood Mac songs are deceptively simple. The rhythm parts mostly sit in open chords and straightforward barre shapes, which is why they became a staple in pub gigs and living room sessions throughout the seventies and beyond. The lead lines can get complicated, but if you stick to the rhythm guitar work, most of their catalog is totally approachable for an intermediate player who already knows their D, G, A, E, and C shapes. I want to talk about Easy Fleetwood Mac Guitar Songs because there is a real reason people gravitate toward this material, and also a real reason they hit a wall when they try to play along with the records. The recordings are layered. What sounds like one guitar is often two or three different parts playing at once. That gap between the tab you find online and what actually comes out of your amp is where most people get frustrated.

Easy Fleetwood Mac Guitar Songs

The five songs I recommend starting with are "Landslide," "Dreams," "Rhiannon," "Go Your Own Way," and "The Chain." That last one is only easy because of the bass line. The guitar is just four bars of Em followed by four bars of C. You can learn it in thirty minutes. The others require a bit more finger movement, but nothing exotic. "Landslide" uses Em, C, G, D in that order. The picking pattern is what matters here, not the chord changes. You need a consistent down-up-down-up strum with a little syncopation on the third beat. If you just strum straight quarters, it will sound stiff and wrong. Play it slightly ahead of the beat on the "and" of two, and it locks in immediately. "Dreams" is entirely Am, F, C, G. The trick is the palm muting on the Am. Lindsey plays it with a loose mute that lets the low string ring just enough to feel warm without sounding muddy. If you press too hard with your picking hand, the chord goes dead. Light touch is the difference between sounding like the record and sounding like you are strangling the guitar.

"Rhiannon" opens with that chromatic descending pattern that runs through the whole intro. It is played as a figured bass line over an Emadd9 shape. Most people try to fret every individual note separately, which slows them down and ruins the flow. You can actually let the open strings ring and only move the fingers that need to change. The Gto A to Ab to G motion works fine if you keep your first finger on the fifth string and use your ring and pinky to slide between notes. I spent about two weeks trying to clean that up by playing every note independently before someone pointed out the open-string approach. That cut my practice time from roughly six hours down to under an hour. "Go Your Own Way" is G, D, Em, C with a driving eighth-note strum. The problem people run into is the tempo. It is fast, around 138 BPM, and most beginners try to play it at full speed right away. Their strumming hand gets sloppy and the chord transitions blur together. Slow it to 90 BPM first. Get the transitions clean at that speed, then bump it by five BPM each day. You will be playing it at tempo in about two weeks instead of two months of frustrated half-speed repetition. "The Chain" has that famous bass section in the middle that everyone remembers, but the guitar part is remarkably sparse. It is essentially a repeated Em-C-G-D progression with occasional double-stops in the upper register. The challenge is dynamics. The song builds from a quiet verse to that loud bridge, and if you play everything at the same volume, the dynamic shift gets lost. I recommend picking the verse softly with your fingers and switching to a pick for the chorus. The tonal difference alone makes the section feel like it is opening up, which is what the original track does.

Here is the thing most beginners miss: Fleetwood Mac records use a lot of open-string resonance and overlapping harmonics. When you learn these songs from a single guitar tab, you are only learning one layer. The full sound comes from the interaction between the two guitarists. A practical workaround is to learn the rhythm part first, then add the occasional harmony note on the high E and B strings during the breaks between vocal phrases. You do not need to nail every harmony. Just sprinkle them in where the original lead guitar fills space. It fills out the sound without requiring you to play two completely independent parts simultaneously. Another counter-intuitive point is that these songs sound better with a slightly darker tone than you might expect. The tendency is to add compression and clean boost to make every chord crystal clear, but that actually exposes the noise and makes the playing sound thinner. Dial back the treble a bit, roll off some of the brightness from your guitar, and let the mids carry the chords. The records from that era were mixed with a lot of midrange presence, and matching that tonal approach makes your playing sit better in the overall sound, whether you are playing solo or with a band. The main limitation to be aware of is that none of these songs are truly beginner-level if you count on playing them exactly as recorded. The strumming patterns, the dynamic control, and the open-string voicings all require some foundational technique. If you are still working on basic chord transitions, start with just the chord shapes and a simple down-strum on each beat. Get the changes smooth at slow speed before adding any rhythm complexity. Rushing into the full arrangements with shaky transitions will reinforce bad habits and make the songs sound worse than they actually are.

For learning resources, the official tab archives on Guitar World's website have decent versions of these songs, but they occasionally mark the positions incorrectly. I always cross-reference with the actual recordings before trusting a tab. YouTube lessons from certified guitar instructors tend to be more accurate, and many of them break down the specific picking patterns that the tabs gloss over. The worst mistake I see is someone learning "Rhiannon" from a tab that shows every chromatic note as a separate fretted position when the open-string method is significantly easier and sounds closer to the record. If you want to expand beyond these five, "Everywhere" and "Don't Stop" use very standard pop progressions that follow the same patterns. "You Make Loving Fun" is slightly more advanced because of the chord substitutions in the bridge, but it is still within reach if you are comfortable with the ones I listed above. The core technique you develop from learning these songs transfers directly to almost any classic rock material from the seventies.