Holiday Guitar Lesson – Green Day

About this lesson

With our guitar tutorial on Holiday, you will learn these guitar skills: Alternate picking, Power chords.

Holiday is a classic electric guitar song by Green Day. It resembles American Idiot in its structure, but is a bit slower-paced, and uses more techniques.

Through practicing this song, you’ll get a great chance to practice many-many power chords in a really colorful progression, which you can later use to make up songs on your own. You’ll also learn a couple of riffs, which sound really cool under distortion.

If you watch the video, you’ll learn a really handy plectrum switching technique, which will enable you to freely switch between fingerpicking and plucking with the pick at your leisure, whenever you want. It’s a really convenient technique since you won’t need to put your plectrum down and pick it up when you want to switch between fingerpicking and plucking, so be sure to practice it!

All in all, learning to play Holiday on the guitar will not only drive your neighbors crazy ( 🙂 since it uses heavy distortion), but give you a chance to practice the punk rock genre through learning power chord fingering and power chord progressions.

You’ll also learn the pluck switch-over technique and single-string alternate plucking, so this one is another very useful beginner guitar lesson that will really advance your skills.

Holiday song details

Holiday was the first single from Green Day’s 7th album, American Idiot, released in 2005 as a single album. This song was actually a prelude to Boulevard of Broken Dreams. The riff used in the song samples Iggy Pop’s The Passenger.

The song has a spoken word segment, which was very controversial at the time of its debut. It has a clear and sarcastic anti-fascist and anti-war political agenda focusing on George W. Bush, a fact that Green Day likes to emphasize at concerts. If you haven’t heard it yet, listen to it on YouTube.

Holiday awards and chart rankings

• Billboard Hot 100: #19
• Hot Modern Rock Tracks: #1
• Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks: #1
• The song was featured in the movie Accepted, and Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland skateboarding video game.

Skills you'll learn