Advanced Acoustic, Advanced Electric, Songbook + TAB

Lovely Day (Bill Withers) Guitar Lesson with Backing Tracks + TAB

In this guitar lesson, we look at how to play Lovely Day using TAB for all sections – both for acoustic and electric guitar. Practise with Backing Tracks!

Lovely Day | TAB

Let’s look at how to play Lovely Day on both acoustic and electric guitar. Play along with the original recording to make sure it’s working.

As the bass is the prominent instrument, let’s start by learning the intro and verse on the bass – it looks like this in TAB:

Play this with the original recording, especially during the intro, to get the feel just right.

Next, lets look at the original guitar from the intro and verse.

Lovely Day TAB, electric original intro and verse.

As great as this part is, it doesn’t come back when the verse return and it is dependent on the shaker, strings and keyboards on the recording to fit in.

In a live situation, you will need to pull your weight more than just play this part so let’s look at what that could be.

Electric Guitar Ideas

Let’s start with the verse.

I like creating some movement between the root and the 7th, hence the E – Emaj7 – E – Emaj7. Same goes for the C#m and C#m7.

An Amaj7 and C#m is essentially the same notes so for Amaj7, I just kept the same part which gave us an Asus2 or Amaj9 chords.

For the last bar, I kept the Amaj7 idea, then Cmaj7 – Bm7 using 8th notes. When repeated, it’s straight to Cmaj7 so I maintained the rhythm.

Bridge

Here’s the bridge for the electric guitar:

Since C is the same chord as Am7, and D is the same as Bm7, we highlight this by playing almost the same thing twice. The only difference being that the first time has more strums.

Chorus

This is similar to the verse, with two additional strums. The main difference being that we now include the top string.

To fret the chords going from Emaj7 to C#m7; use the ring finger on C#m7, then switch to index for C#m.

Play along using the backing track, when you feel comfortable, try varying the ideas presented above. Maybe you start with the original part!

Acoustic Guitar Ideas

Lovely Day works really well in the Motown Soul repertoire, I would go as far as calling it a standard. As you’ll find plenty of singers who know it, it’s a good suggestion for the acoustic repertoire too.

Here’s an Acoustic verse idea. We take advantage of the two available open strings:

Bridge

The bridge is tricky as we must include all the cool bass lines. Practise this a lot until it feels natural so you can grove effortlessly.

Clearly, this has to be more involved on the acoustic than the electric – the bass line must be included and we want to emphasise the difference between C and Am7, rather than the similarities.