Success Quote by Lindsey Buckingham

Buckingham is describing a small technical hack with big artistic consequences: when the obvious routes fail, you change the instrument until it gives you a new answer. Dropping the G string a whole step so it functions as a seventh isn’t just guitar-nerd trivia; it’s a glimpse into how his signature style gets built. Instead of brute-forcing difficult passages with speed or strength, he redesigns the terrain so the music can flow. The “weird tuning” is a quiet manifesto for arrangement as problem-solving, where virtuosity is less about athletic display than about engineering a shortcut that still sounds like magic.

The subtext is humility with an edge. “After a couple of failed attempts” admits the myth of effortless genius is fake, but “it got me to a place” frames experimentation as a deliberate journey, not flailing. He’s also smuggling in a philosophy of texture: a seventh baked into the open strings lets you summon tension, color, and that Fleetwood Mac emotional unease with minimal fretting. The guitar becomes a harmonic mood board.

Contextually, Buckingham’s work has always been about making one player sound like a small machine: fingerpicked patterns, pseudo-percussive strums, layered parts that feel inevitable once you hear them. That inevitability is the trick. “It was not an easy thing to work out” punctures the smooth surface of the finished record, reminding you that elegance often comes from wrestling with constraints until they start singing back.