Into The Great Wide Open (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers) Guitar Lesson with TAB

Into The Great Wide Open Guitar Lesson + TAB

In this guitar lesson, you'll get TAB for how you could play this as the only guitarist in the band, a combination of Mike and Tom's original parts.

Into The Great Wide Open | TAB

On the record, Tom and Mike have layered several parts that sound great but won’t help you on this Saturday night’s gig.

Here’s a verse part that would work should you play Into The Great Wide Open with your band.

There are lots of little details here worth mentioning. The Em and Am progressions are similar but not the same. For the Em, the bass player stays on the E, so it’s the extensions that change. For Am, it’s the actual bass – genius!

The C chord is played without string 5, but since the bass plays a C, we must call it a C, not a C/E, or a C/G.

The D5 makes the initial D chord more powerful, the last two open strings make it easier to play the first chorus chords.

Here are Into The Great Wide Open’s chorus chords as a part, using TAB.

I’ve kept a similar approach to what the verse had in order to have familiarity. Adding one more string on beat two fattens it just enough.

The Dadd4 is a chord with both the sus4 and 3rd, this is the same chord that R.E.M. plays in their Man On The Moon.

Into The Great Wide Open TAB | Related Pages

Into The Great Wide Open | Chords + Lyrics

Learn to play Into The Great Wide Open by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers using chords, lyrics, chord analysis, a chord chart, and the original recording.

| Em Emmaj7 | Em7 Em6 |
Eddie waited ’til he finished high school…

Five similar tunes | Chords + Lyrics

When you can play the TAB for Into The Great Wide Open, try these five tunes from the songbook.

Tom Petty tunes

Tom Petty wrote Into The Great Wide Open.

Tom Petty released most of his albums with his band The Heartbreakers although some solo material appeared as well.

His best-known tunes include American Girl, Free Fallin’, Learning To Fly, Into The Great Wide Open, Don’t Come Around Here No More, and I Won’t Back Down.

Tom Petty on the web

About me | Dan Lundholm

Dan Lundholm wrote this guitar lesson and TAB for Into The Great Wide Open's chords.

This guitar lesson by Dan Lundholm features TAB and covers Into The Great Wide Open. Discover more about him and how you can learn guitar with Spytunes.

Most importantly, find out why you should learn guitar through playing tunes, not practising scales, and studying theory in isolation.