Today we learn how to play Surfin’ USA by The Beach Boys in this acoustic guitar tutorial. This song from 1963 is one of my favourite Beach Boys songs. It’s a great fun, uptempo song sprinkled with rock n roll.
There are only actually 3 chords in the song but it has so much more than that going on. The original recording is in Eb but today the lesson is transposed into D to give us more possibilities in how we can play this. It also makes the song much more accessible to a wider range of abilities. We can then put a capo on fret 1 and slide everything we’ve learned up a fret and that will put us back into Eb just like the Beach Boys.
I’ll start off with the iconic intro riff which has ROCK N ROLL SURF GUITAR all over it. The Verse section consists of Rock n Roll riffs in A D & E. I have shown open string and fretted variations. The chorus has a great upbeat, bouncy rhythm using the same chord sequence but now using either open chords or barre chords. The outro fuses a few bits together…
THE SONG:
The Intro –Â
Follow the tab below for the ICONIC intro
The Verse-
The Rock n Roll Riff plays through positions in D, G & A. Â I have included a version using the open strings (1) as well as a fretted version (2)
1)