A personal foible I know, but I’ve always been of the opinion that of the Beatles, Paul McCartney was the only one anything special in the way he actually played his instrument.
The others are perfectly acceptable jobbing musos but as guitar players (and drummer of course) really nothing unusual. As songwriters, as a band, as singers even, yes, but not in the workaday sense of the way the instruments themselves were played.
Kim du Toit (who was a bass player) agrees and so apparently does Daniel Levitin, a Professor of psychology and music:
The Beatles incorporated classical elements into rock music so
seamlessly that it is easy to forget that string quartets and Bach-like
countermelodies and bass lines (not to mention plagal cadences) did not
always populate pop music.
So now I know why, all those plagals.
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