Deck The Halls by Green Day

Intro & Tone

We've gone all pop punk for this track, and given it a real Green Day feel! This means lots of powerchords, high gain and a very full on drum track! We have two parts here to learn, the rhythm section and the lead section, and you're welcome to jump between the two if you like. Let's begin by getting your tone right...

The base of our tone is using a Marshall JCM 800 style preset in TONEX by IK Multimedia. This is an incredible piece of kit and you can see we have the EQ quite flat, gain pretty high and the presence dialled to 12 o'clock! This is where a program like Amplitube or TONEX really works out, as recording an amp like this, at that volume, would blow your ears out!

For both rhythm and lead we used a Les Paul style guitar, with two humbuckers. We used the bridge pick up for both as it was not only extremely "fat" sounding, but also had a bit more clarity to it than the neck pickup.

The Lead Guitar

For the lead guitar part, we are focusing on the high end sound (you have the octave underneath that as well on the track). The combination of the two gives it that more pop punk vibe. The key of the track is Eb major, and we're using our Box 1 of the major scale, which can be found in the fretboard diagram

Let's also take a quick look at the core chord changes in this progression. The chords have been edited slightly from the original, to bring it more in line with a Green Day feel. You'll notice that it's all powerchords, and there are a lot of pushes with the chords. This is a big part of that Green Day feel, so pay close attention to that!

If you'd like to get more to grips with this pop punk style a bit more, get started with the Beginners Electric Level 2 course today!