Rush - Red Barchetta - Guitar Lesson

Moving Pictures (2011 Remaster)

1981 6:10

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About Red Barchetta

Few songs from 1981 demand as much from a guitarist's right hand as "Red Barchetta." The track lives in E minor and sits at a steady 120 BPM, but the real challenge is Alex Lifeson's picking hand discipline: he weaves clean arpeggiated passages against chunky power-chord punches, and the transitions between those textures have to be precise. The intro arpeggio figure is deceptively simple to read on the tab but surprisingly easy to rush, so use the Practice Toolbar to loop it slowed down until the spacing between notes feels completely even. The mid-song build, where the dynamic shifts from a quiet melodic phrase to a full-band drive, asks you to control your pick attack carefully rather than just turning up. Rush play in E Standard tuning here, which keeps everything accessible without any retuning. If you enjoy the progressive-rock side of the song's structure, the Progressive Rock genre page has plenty of related material to work through.

• The intro arpeggio pattern in E minor is the first thing to nail, and looping it slowed down will expose any unevenness in your picking or fretting hand.
• Alex Lifeson uses E Standard tuning throughout, so no retuning is needed, but clean pick attack across the dynamic shifts is the real technical hurdle.
• The song's structure alternates between gentle picked passages and hard-strummed chord sections, making left-hand muting between those transitions a key thing to practise.