The Beatles

The feedback note that opens "I Feel Fine" was one of the first intentional uses of guitar feedback on a pop record. Lennon leaned his Gibson J-160E against a Vox amp and let the low A string feed back, then they kept it because it sounded cool. This was 1964, before Hendrix made feedback his signature.

George Harrison's solo on "Nowhere Man" was played on a Fender Stratocaster through a Vox AC30 with heavy treble boost from the amp's top-boost circuit, producing that shimmery, compressed tone. He and Lennon doubled the part in unison, which is why it sounds so thick on the record.

The jangling 12-string sound that defined early Beatles was George Harrison's Rickenbacker 360/12, he was one of the first major artists to use the model, and Roger McGuinn of The Byrds heard it and bought one, launching an entire genre of jangle-pop guitar.

Paul McCartney played the stinging lead guitar on "Taxman," not George Harrison. McCartney also played the fuzz-soaked guitar solo on "Good Morning Good Morning" and the acoustic parts on "Blackbird," making him a seriously underrated guitarist in his own right.

For the "Revolution" single, Lennon wanted the dirtiest guitar sound possible, so the engineers ran his Epiphone Casino directly into the mixing console preamps and deliberately overloaded them. The result was a blown-out fuzz tone that predated modern DI distortion by decades.

George Harrison's slide guitar work on later Beatles tracks and his solo career was largely self-taught using a glass Coricidin medicine bottle as a slide, the same type Duane Allman favored. He tuned to open E and open D for most of his slide work.

The backward guitar solo on "I'm Only Sleeping" was painstakingly composed by Harrison, who wrote out the notes forward, reversed them, and then learned to play the reversed version so it would sound melodic when the tape was flipped. It took an entire session to nail it.