American Pie Rhythm Guitar

Rhythm Guitar in folk rock like this can easily become mindless strumming.
Hearing yourself as a "strummer" in a band, and singing at the same time, is not something that lends itself to much detail.

As a solo acoustic guitar arrangement on the other hand, we get plenty of interesting challenges to overcome!

The intro part, which is originally played on piano, has been replaced with a picking and strumming part that is completely down to the vocal when it comes to placement.

In complete free time this can take a while to get right if you don't know the singer well.  

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Following A Singer

American Pie is actually the only song that Spytunes recorded guitar and vocal simultaneously. It was just too hard to do it separately and get it to sound reasonable.

Going from free tempo to slow verse, to accelerated chorus into a steady tempo for the main part of the song, back down to free time for the outro, finally back to half time for the last chorus is not easy!

Make sure such elementary things like a chord progression is not memorized but fully understood so you can focus on what is important; rhythm, placement and communication with other musicians.
American Pie is a brilliant song to test such skills.