Lindsey Buckingham is best known as a songwriter and singer. He’s not often in top 10 lists of guitar heroes because he isn’t your typical guitar-slinging rock god, but he's a seriously gifted and unique player.
There are plenty of times during his tenure with Fleetwood Mac where Lindsey let rip and pulled out some pretty tasty lead guitar chops, but typically we find him sitting more in the rhythm world. He usually crafts very intricately picked guitar lines and uses a range of suspended chords and alternate voicings.
In this lesson we’re going to check out four chords direct from his guitar style!
Csus2
A big part of the Lindsey Buckingham acoustic guitar style, as heard in the track Landslide, is his use of chords that stay the same but the bass note moves.
Take this Csus2 as a starting point, you could apply a Travis Picking style rhythm to this then move the low C note down a fret to the B note to re-voice the chord as a G/B. If you then drop that B note down to the Bb on the 1st fret, you get a Gm/Bb chord.
This simple technique allows you to move one note, the root, and imply multiple chords.
Gmin/D (double drop D)
In the Fleetwood Mac song The Chain, Buckingham is playing in double drop D tuning (D A D G B D) with a capo on the 2nd fret. This chord appears in the chorus of the song and is a Gmin chord played in this tuning but with a low D note in the bass.
The recording of this chord is played with a capo on the 2nd fret just like you hear in The Chain but this also works without the capo.
Dmaj7
This variation of a Dmaj7 chord can be heard in the track Sara. This chord takes the form of a D Minor chord, but you’re playing it on the 5th, 6th and 7th frets. The open D string is still the root, and you’re fretting the maj7, maj3rd and 5th notes.
This chord gives a slightly different feel to the Dmaj7 chord in the intro of this song.
Fsus2
This Fsus2 chord comes from the pre-chorus of the track You Make Loving Fun. This is in the form of the C chord from the CAGED system, except you’re not playing the 6th fret on the D string, which is the Maj3rd of the chord.
In the song, Linsdsey plays the sus2 voicing and them hammers on to the maj3rd to make it an F major chord. To do this, you’ll need to keep your third finger free for the hammer on while maintaining the sus2 form.
Learn 4 Jeff Beck guitar chords
