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.
A great way to add a percussive pop to your rhythm patterns is to play scratch rhythms on beats two and four of each measure, simulating the sound of a backbeat snare drum.
Blues and rock are two styles that are heavily intertwined, and the rhythm pattern in Example 3 instills more of a bluesy sound into your rhythm simply because it’s a common rhythm pattern in blues tunes.
As you practice your scales, it’s good to remind yourself of the function of the individual notes of those scales. Here we start with open-position scales taken from the chord progression for "Autumn Leaves."
Looking at bass notes this way gives you some flexibility to begin working melodic lines into the otherwise-basic chord progressions in the Carter Family repertoire
The music in most guitar books and magazines is written in standard notation and tablature. Here's how to read standard guitar notation and guitar tabs.
Natural harmonics are produced at specific locations, or nodes, that divide an open string into equal parts. The pitch is determined by the number of divisions.
If you’ve explored my Acoustic Rock Basics lesson “Soloing with Pentatonic Scales,” you’ll notice that the major scale encompasses the major pentatonic and adds two more notes: the fourth and seventh of the key.
Monotonic-bass fingerpicking, in which your thumb keeps playing the same bass note instead of alternating between two or three notes, is common in acoustic blues but works great in folk and rock, too.
The two classic slide materials are glass and metal. Some of the first slides were made from the tops of wine bottles (hence the term bottleneck guitar) or from lengths of pipe (hence the term . . . er . . . metal slide).
The blues shuffle rhythm has a kind of swing feel that always gets the party started and can be heard throughout the blues world. Here’s a look at the basic elements of this rhythm pattern. Blues Shuffle Basics There are a lot of different ways to play this beat. Let’s…
Posted by Scott Nygaard After you’ve settled into the basic bluegrass and country boom-chuck rhythm pattern, you’re bound to start looking for something else to do with your fingers to help embellish different parts of a song. One easy way to do this is to add bass runs between chords.…
Many of the best licks and riffs by artists like the Beatles and Neil Young are really just made up of bits and pieces of easy chord shapes. You can use these same basic chord shapes to create cool riffs for your own songs.
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.
