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.
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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.
Playing solos using scales is great, but that’s just the beginning. One way to flesh out the sound of scales is by adding intervals on an adjacent string to create simple harmonies.
Celtic guitar master John Doyle took some time out from the recent Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow, Scotland, to offer tips on improving your Celtic guitar playing. Doyle will have a new solo album on Compass Records towards the end of the year. Different tunings “My advice is that you…
Whatever style you prefer—and regardless of whether you’re more of a soloist or accompanist—you should learn how to get these techniques under your fingers.
Even if your playing in the practice room sounds good, you need to practice and learn the piece in a manner robust enough to withstand the pressure of onstage performance.
An ancient folk song chronicling boating misadventures, “Sloop John B” was transformed into a chamber-pop classic when the Beach Boys recorded the tune and released it on their groundbreaking 1966 album Pet Sounds. Before then, the song—originally called “The John B. Sails”—had traveled far and wide. It originated in the…
I first heard “Swing Gitan” backstage at a Djangofest jam between some younger players in Seattle, who were playing it as if they themselves had written it! (That’s true of Gypsy-jazz players, many who really get inside every song they play). It’s a great vehicle for the showy, virtuosic style…
One of the best ways to add an expressive character to your playing is through the use of slurs (slides, hammer-ons, and pull-offs), bends, and vibrato. So much of the vocal quality guitar players like to emulate comes from the fret-hand manipulation of the strings. In this lesson, you’ll take the A minor pentatonic scale and use it to create musical phrases that allow you to manipulate the strings using these various techniques.
[Editor’s note] Peggy Seeger is no stranger to folklore. Her father was the famed folklorist Charles Seeger; her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a trailblazing avant-garde composer. Her folk musician brother, Mike Seeger, co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers, one of the most influential groups in the 1960s folk revival.…
For this lesson, I’ve written a Johnson-inspired blues in A major that teaches you the typical intro, walkdown, fills, verses, and guitar break he used in songs.
I first heard this spiritual number on an album called Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s, released in the late 1960s on the Folkways label. Ashley was a banjo player, singer, and entertainer who had played medicine shows, frolics, concerts, and dances throughout North Carolina. That collection of tunes featured…
Songs in 3/4 can sound sweet on acoustic guitar, especially when you go beyond a basic one-two-three waltz rhythm and take a more nuanced approach to picking patterns, chord voicings, and bass lines.
Harvey Reid says, “the best way to learn to play music is by playing songs, and there is no better place to start than some good songs that are easy to play.”
I met up with Doyle at a Philadelphia-area house concert where, joined by fiddler Duncan Wickel, he performed a stunning show that displayed the full range of his powers on guitar, from rollicking rhythm to beautifully melodic fingerstyle (actually played with a pick and one finger). Before the show, the easygoing virtuoso sat down with his left-handed Muiderman flattop to shed light on how he honors and stretches tradition as a guitarist and songwriter.
Funk guitar might be most commonly associated with scratchy electric rhythms, but the acoustic guitar lends itself just as well to these cool percussive sounds.
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.
