Solsbury Hill Guitar Lesson

If you’re after a tune that’s got heart, groove, and a sprinkle of prog-rock weirdness, 'Solsbury Hill' by Peter Gabriel ticks all the boxes. It’s one of those songs that might sound relatively simple on the surface, but there’s some sneaky magic under the hood—most notably, that iconic 7/4 time signature that gives it a rolling, forward-pushing feel.

This one’s a great study in rhythm, feel, and dynamics. The acoustic guitar drives the whole track with a steady Travis-picking pattern that locks in beautifully with the vocals. Whether you’re just here to jam or really want to dive into what makes this song so unique, we’ll break it down step by step and get you playing it like a pro!

Before we jump into the lesson, please note that there will not be any tabs in this write-up. Instead, please use the incredible video lesson presented by Thomas to get a feel of the rhythm as well as details on frets played.

Section A

Let's address the elephant in the room before we even think about the chord shapes - we're not in 4/4. Usually, if we're not in 4/4, we end up in 6/8, 12/8 or some other derivative thereof. However, we're in the very proggy time-signature of 7/4 for this track!

Most songs you hear on the radio are in 4/4 time—four beats per bar, easy to tap your foot to. But 'Solsbury Hill' takes a bit of a left turn with 7/4 time, which means there are seven beats in each measure instead of four. It’s like your foot’s tapping along just fine, then suddenly goes, “Wait, what?”—but in a good way!

Think of it like this: you’re counting 1-2-3-4-5-6-7, and then the cycle repeats. That extra beat gives the song a kind of off-kilter, forward-moving feeling—like it’s constantly leaning into the next phrase. It might feel weird at first, but once it clicks, it’s super satisfying. This track uses it so naturally, you might not even notice it unless you’re counting.

If you're finding counting to 7 quite musically awkward, try counting a bar of 4/4 and a bar of 3/4. This will help define some form of accent between each bar, and hopefully make the pulse feel more natural!

Chord time! Let's start with some good news - we only need three pretty simply chord shapes to play this section - D, A and E. We need to have our capo on the 2nd fret to play along in the right key!

You might've noticed that I've included a barre for both the D and A major chords. This is because it's far faster to change between the two shapes by just in staying position - I guarantee it will make your playing much smoother! As for the E major chord - you can play the full E major shape, but you're also welcome to just play the 2nd fret of the D-string and 1st fret of the G-string. We're not hitting the A-string, so it's entirely a matter of preference!

Once you've got the chords under your fingers, you're ready to tackle the picking side of things! We're going to be using a technique called Travis-picking. This technique makes use of the thumb alternating between bass notes (usually on the E-, A-, and D-strings) while the fingers pluck melody or harmony notes on the higher strings.

If you watch the video closely, you'll notice that Thomas mostly uses just his first and second finger to pluck the melody or harmony notes. This means that you'll want to practice moving across the strings with these two fingers as well. Occasionally, Thomas introduces his third finger when he wants to pluck a full chord. Here's a quick exercise to help you practice this technique:

Please be sure to watch the video to see exactly what picking pattern Thomas is using for each chord.

There is one tricky little change upon the second repeat of the pattern - we need to play the open E-string over the D major chord. The reason this is trickier than it seems all comes down to us needing to keep the bar across the 2nd fret. To make this work, we need to visualise our finger in three segments - the top, middle, and lower digits. If the top digit is your fingertip, and the lower is the closest digit towards your hand - keep the top and middle digits flat, while 'popping' the lower digit away from the fretboard. This will ensure that you're staying in the barred position, but allowing that open E-string to ring out.

Section B

To make the structure of the second section a bit more easily digestible, we're going to break it into four parts sections that all use slightly different chords, but with the same Travis-picking pattern and timing!

Part 1

The first set of chords that we're going to use are A and E. These are the same shapes from section A - I would recommend to keep using the barre position for the A major shape as well to keep consistent. The odd time signature, 7/4, continues to make things a bit awkward, so be sure to really hear where Thomas is changing chords in the video!

Each part consists of two bars - the first swapping between the two chords, and the second is a Travis-picked pattern on the held chord. Sounding like a broken record here, but, please watch the video to get the exact rhythm and picking pattern!

Part 2

The picking pattern remains the same for the first bar, but changes ever so slightly in the second - you know where to go to get the details! Other than that, all we need to do is replace the A major for an F# minor. Fortunately, we don't want, nor need to barre across all of the strings for this chord shape. We just need to barre across the top three strings, and use our third and fourth fingers on the fourth frets of the A- and D- strings respectively.

Part 3

You've guessed it, we're once again using the same pattern, but this time, we're moving it all up to start on the open D-string. We're also now replacing the F# minor for a D major 7 chord - which might sound more complicated, but is much easier to play! All you need to do for this chord is barre the 2nd frets on the top three strings, making sure the D-string remains open.

One small, yet important change that we do need to make is to keep the D-string open when playing E major. That means that we only want to play the 1st fret of the G string when moving down to the E major chord, only for this section. We could call this specific shape either E/D, or the third inversion of E7.

Part 4

The final part is a bit of a mash-up of part B and part C - we want to start the pattern with the F# minor chord, but instead of going back to F#m after playing the E chord, we want to transition to Dmaj7.

Before we look at the final section of the track, let's make sure we're happy with the structure of this section, and how these four parts work together:

Section C

The third and final section is by far the shortest of the three. Initially, we want to replicate part 2 of section B - where we jump between F#m and E. However, there is one very small little change - we want to barre across all of the strings when coming back to the F#m, as we want to play the note of F# on the 2nd fret of the low E-string. You don't need to play the whole F#m shape though, just the barre.

Following this, we need to play a handful of new chord shapes in quick succession as they only last one beat each. I'll let the chord charts below do the talking!

Please note that the chords in the image above are in the exact order that you need to play them. This then takes us back into the instrumental section A, with the very slight change of hammering on to the 3rd fret of the B-string over the D major. Other than that, everything repeats exactly in the same order for the rest of the track! Here's the overarching structure of the track, just to make sure you're as confident as possible when playing through!