One of the things that set The Beatles apart from their contemporaries – and most other groups in the history of music – was the multi-faceted nature of their musicianship. All four members of the band shared in singing duties, while each of them played a myriad of different instruments during the group’s seven-year span recording together.
As The Beatles developed musically, they each became curious to try out new instruments on recordings and even swapped roles with their bandmates on many occasions. These things make it especially hard to collate information about who played what on every single Beatles recording, although music historian Ian McDonald had a go in his wonderful book Revolution in the Head.
The group had three specialist guitar players: John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Lennon learnt the guitar as a means of songwriting as a teenager, having been taught the ukulele by his mother. McCartney, meanwhile, was a natural self-taught musician, having grown up in a very musical family. And Harrison mastered the role of lead guitar from an early age, auditioning for the group by performing the complex guitar part from Carl Perkins’ song ‘Raunchy’ for Lennon as they rode the bus home together, aged just 15.
When bassist Stuart Sutcliffe left the band in 1961 to pursue his interest in painting, McCartney took over the instrument, meaning he spent less time on the guitar during Beatles performances. The band’s classic lineup featured Lennon on rhythm guitar, McCartney on bass, Harrison on lead guitar and Starr on drums.
So, which of the three Beatles guitarists comes out on top?
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To determine the answer to this question, we’ll use the same rules as when we determined which Beatles singer sang the most lead vocal parts in the band. A guitar part of any kind in any song counts as one song for the Beatle in question, including on the three singles completed after Lennon’s death. But bass guitar doesn’t count (sorry, Paul).
Using these criteria, one Beatle trounces the rest. George Harrison played guitar on a massive 189 Beatles tracks. That’s 88% of the band’s officially released output. He leaves John Lennon more than 50 guitar parts behind, while Paul McCartney doesn’t even reach half of Harrison’s guitar.
In fairness, though, McCartney was stuck on bass for most of the band’s first five years of recording and did try to make up for it by taking guitar parts off Harrison whenever he could from 1966 onwards. But Harrison was the band’s undisputed lead guitarist, and came to be defined by his instrument long before his songwriting prowess blossomed in the late 1960s.
Harrison played guitar in some form on every song The Beatles released until 1965’s ‘Yesterday’. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’ were the first songs he featured on without a guitar a year later. He played guitar on all of his own Beatles compositions except for one, 1968’s B-side ‘The Inner Light’, for which he deferred instrumentation to a set of Indian musicians.
The last time he played guitar on a Beatles record before the band split up was during their very last session in the studio together, for his own song ‘I Me Mine’ on January 3rd 1970. Lennon had already left the previous summer, so Harrison played all the guitar parts on the song. What better way to put a full stop at the end of his time as the group’s leading exponent of the instrument?
