Below is the lesson for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys.

Helpful Tips

This arrangement combines fingerpicking and strumming to recreate the good vibes that The Beach Boys are known for. Most of this arrangement is fairly straightforward, but there are a couple tricky aspects to it.

The first of which you’ll encounter in measure 3, a HUGE stretch chord: 0017. Yikes, right! In the lesson video, Matt will talk about a way to mute the second string, in essence eliminating the stretch. But, here is an alternative chord you can replace it with:

The second tricky aspect of this song is that the rhythm can be quite syncopated. This means that the melody, sometimes, hits “off” the beat (i.e. on the up-beat). Therefore, there are two ways to approach learning the rhythm. The first, and easiest, is to play by ear. This is a song we’ve all heard a million times and know by heart. If you can sing it, you can play it!

The second approach requires an understanding of rhythmic notation. As these rhythms are tricky, I’d recommend counting eighth notes out loud and clapping on the beats before putting it onto the instrument. If you really want to gain a deep understanding of rhythmic notation, there is no better way than by learning to read standard notation.

Part 1 – Performance & Free Lesson

Tab Play Along