We all know the infamous "I only know 3 chords"-statements, but how good/bad was his guitar playing really? Besides the fact that he actually plays more than 3 chords on CLTCL, I do have a feeling he might've been better on guitar than strumming a few chords. Thoughts?
He wasn't half bad I think. He composed Ogre Battle and supposedly Great King Rat on the guitar - the former has a riff that is by no means hard, but would take some rudimentary alternate picking technique to perform. IIRC Brian has told a story of Freddie playing the guitar with his right hand moving at "frenetic speeds" or something along those lines.
He could play well. Well enough to write on guitar and perform some simple strummed accompaniment. That's something he shared with probably hundreds of thousands of people.
Oscar J wrote:
He composed Ogre Battle and supposedly Great King Rat on the guitar - the former has a riff that is by no means hard, but would take some rudimentary alternate picking technique to perform.
You don't need to be able to play it in order to compose it. He could've sung it to Brian.