Episode One - The Intro To "Wouldn't It Be Nice"

Fantastic!!!

So good to see the Power Mower back in action. The world just became a brighter place.

Enjoyed that breakdown very much. As a long time player myself, I usually avoid trying to play Brians’ music..it’s so complex! But in a beautiful way of course.

i live 15 minutes south of BWI airport, hit me up for suggestions regarding living around here if you like. 

JH 

I would argue that many of these unusual guitar parts are not only down to Brian not being a guitar player, but also down to Brian not really being a great instrumentalist in general.  These guitar lines are not really pianistic either.  So like, the YSBIM line comes straight from the vocal arrangement.  He sings the WIBN intro to Hal et al.  These ideas come from a singer and vocal arranger's mind: not a instrumentalist's.

PS: I plan to cover the development of Brian's guitar lines in some depth over the course of many videos, so keep a look out.

Much.

Well here's a little follow up video addressing some comments.

I can think of a few off the top of my head in from the boots:

Intro on WIBN
Middle voice in GOK bridge when he wants the non-chord tone
IJWMFTT, very briefly to give Glen the notes he wants played
Here Today, telling Al Casey how he wants the guitar rhythm to be punctuated
I wanna say This Whole World he briefly sings a desired interval to David Cohen
Corrects Don Randi's organ line on Please Let Me Wonder

And, used instruments like voices.

I'm hyperliteral.

I have been thinking more about how Brian's inadequacies as an instrumentalist might have contributed to his novel orchestration, and it hit me that this is one very important reason that the studio players were so essential to the explosion of creativity.  You can really hear it between All Summer Long and Today.  It's not so much that he needed them to play the parts, it's that he needed them to realise the parts.  It wasn't so much about simple ability to play the notes -- I suspect Carl could have handled most of the guitar parts just fine, for instance -- but what Brian needed was to be suspended in a solution of musical literacy, where he could communicate by bouncing his sort of inchoate ideas off the studio friends, using his voice (or his crude piano playing), and not only having them hear and replicate whatever Brian had in mind, but also imbue the parts with the kind of nous and experienced subtlety that only people with a complete musical mental library could effect.  

And I think that this was probably not just true for Brian, although I think Brian was more gifted than many other people who were using the Studio musicians in LA in a similar way.  I do think Brian had a special talent and facility thinking in vocal arrangements that other people without musical literacy lacked.