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.
“Dans Kef” is in a sort of modified Orkney tuning I call Celto-Hawaiian, because it can sound like it’s from the islands. The tune is in fact a good case study in how to build your own Celtic arrangement.
We spend a lot of time trying to find the right notes, or the best words for what we’re trying to say, but how we say something is what helps us leave our mark
There are several things you can do to get a good slide sound: Set up your guitar with heavier strings, use an open tuning, try different kinds of slides, dampen the strings, and learn to properly intonate. Getting a good sound is often as much a function of proper setup as it is technique.
The melodies and harmonies of Joni Mitchell's music rarely unfold in ways that our ears have come to expect. Here's a look at her guitar tuning Odyssey.
The rest stroke—similar to the fingerstyle approach used by classical guitarists—is a plectrum technique in which each downstroke lands on an adjacent string rather than passing over it.
This guitar lesson is based on Little Feat’s original recording of "Willin'," a duet with George on vocals and acoustic guitar and Ry Cooder on bottleneck electric guitar.
Freddie Green is synonymous with swing guitar. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1911, Green enjoyed a 50-year career holding down the rhythm chair of Count Basie’s famed big band.
As a songwriter, do you stick to your guns and your own songs—or cave and just deliver the hits everyone can sing along with? There’s a healthier way to look at covers: as a creative vehicle that can actually enhance rather than compete with your songwriting.
We talked to a group of artists and educators who share their favorite exercises, strategies, and tricks for helping get beyond the comfort zone and discover new territory on the guitar.
The capo is a small but powerful tool for guitarists that raises the notes of the open strings but retains the individual relationships between strings. Here's how to use one.
Guitarist and W.C. Handy scholar Jon Shain shares strategies for adapting ragtime pieces for fingerstyle guitar using the 1917 Handy song "Beale Street Blues" as an example.
Learn to use three-note, three-string triads — you probably already know a lot of these chords, and in this lesson, you’ll find ways to repurpose them.
"Fortune Turns the Wheel" is simple, and the sung melody needs little in the way of instrumental propulsion, so the guitar setting is spare in this arrangement.
Reverend Gary Davis is widely celebrated as a genius of blues fingerpicking. In this guitar lesson, Ernie Hawkins, who studied with him, teaches his style.
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.
