Learning to play songs in different keys by actually transposing and understanding the resulting chords and melodies can transform your guitar playing.
Make chord progressions more distinctive and get outside the box of strumming block chords.
Stay Loose and Avoid Injury by Developing a Guitar Warm-Up Routine
12 Ways to Challenge Yourself on Guitar
Editor's Picks
Adam Perlmutter is the editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine and has written hundreds of articles, reviews, and song introductions (as well as expertly engraving and transcribing the music for a comparable number of lessons and compositions.)
It’s impossible to choose favorites, but here are a few lessons he’s worked on recently and suggests you check out.
Learning to play songs in different keys by actually transposing and understanding the resulting chords and melodies can transform your guitar playing.
We've published the music to more than 1,500 songs in Acoustic Guitar magazine since 1990. Now you can easily locate the issue in which a song appeared.
Metheny manages to capture the wistful vibe of this Beatles classic while casting it in a bossa nova–inspired setting and updating it with his intricate sense of harmony and phrasing.
My instrumental arrangement of “Idumea” was originally conceived for clawhammer banjo, but here I’ve translated it to guitar with an alternating bass pattern.
In this live workshop, ‘Holiday Songs for Fingerstyle Guitar’ author Sean McGowan explores an arrangement from the book and gives an inside look into his arranging process.
This intimate song is built on layers of acoustic guitar, with fingerstyle parts that are so closely entwined it’s often hard to pick out the individual instruments.
In this lesson, you’ll see that you can use familiar three-note chords, or triads, to find smooth and easy ways to play different types of seventh chords.
About Acoustic Guitar lessons. Learning to play the guitar takes more than just figuring out what fingers go on which frets and which strings to pluck or pick. You need to absorb these mechanics, for sure, but you also need to know how different techniques fit together and how you can put them to use in service of making music with soul and spirit. Memorizing your favorite players’ licks and arrangements is an essential part of the process, too, but all that work doesn’t truly pay off until you’ve internalized the moves and made them your own. The players and teachers whose words and music are shared on this site understand these facets of learning and offer unique, in-depth lessons. Here, you’ll find riffs and exercises, full songs to play, technique tips, listening suggestions, and advice on how to practice as well as what to practice. We’ve been publishing high-quality guitar lessons since 1990, written and developed by some of the best guitar teachers around.
