Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, founding editor of Acoustic Guitar, is a grand prize winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and author of The Complete Singer-Songwriter, Beyond Strumming, and other books and videos for musicians. In addition to his ongoing work with AG, he offers live workshops for guitarists and songwriters, plus video lessons, song charts, and tab, on Patreon.
Tony Trischka grew up with Pete Seeger’s banjo ringing in his house, by way of his parents’ records of the Weavers, the Almanac Singers, and Seeger’s folk songs for children. In 1962, at age 13, Trischka started getting serious about…
The Spur is a batch of songs that reflect on putting down roots, coming out of what Joan Shelley calls a “period of opposite extremes—of creative hyper-connection and physical isolation."
Watch Joan Armatrading play "Love and Affection" on her Ovation 12-string guitar, and learn some tips for playing the song with her rich chord voicings.
Joan Armatrading has followed her own path for 50 years to become one of the most revered songwriters of her generation. Here's an in-depth look at her guitar playing.
At 83, the guitarist Happy Traum is remarkably youthful—still playing concerts & teaching. Here is a retrospective of his life in music as captured by 6 songs.
Learning to play your favorites tunes accurately and thoroughly requires digging deeper than visiting online tab libraries. Here are tips to help with the process.
David Surette was renowned for his superb solo fingerstyle guitar arrangements of Celtic tunes, as well as the Grateful Dead guitar/mandolin duo Steve and Dave Play Dead.
The title track of Larkin Poe’s 2020 album Self Made Man is a blues rock banger, with crunchy electric guitar by Rebecca Lovell & scorching slide by Megan Lovell.
Check out Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers' fingerstyle guitar arrangements of 3 Christmas classics: “The First Noel,” “Joy to the World,” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”
An immersion in Bill Withers’ music brings powerful lessons for any guitar-playing songwriter, especially about the value of directness. This lesson goes inside some of Withers’ best songs—especially from his first few albums, when his own guitar was most prominent—to reveal the understated accompaniment style that carries them.
To play the acoustic guitar rhythm part of Lucinda Williams' "Passionate Kisses", capo at the fourth fret and use C shapes, which sound in the key of E major.
Fingerpicking and dropped-D tuning fit together like hand and glove. For evidence, just consider the long list of fingerpicking classics played in dropped D, which includes Jorma Kaukonen’s “Embryonic Journey,” Pete Seeger’s “Living in the Country,” the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence,”…
A skilled and precise fingerstyle player, Joan Baez modeled an approach to accompaniment that was not flashy, but effective, elegant, and complete-sounding with no other instruments.
In 2010, during a visit to New York City, Ben Harper stopped into the guitar mecca Rudy’s Music to check out instruments. He was sampling a series of top-of-the-line archtops when a guitar stopped him in his tracks: an instrument by renowned luthier John Monteleone. Though Harper is best known as a lap steel player who brought vintage Weissenborns into the limelight of contemporary roots-rock, he heard in that archtop a tone quality that he’d been seeking for years, and he wondered whether Monteleone would consider building a guitar for lap slide.
Released as the first single from Ben Harper’s album Both Sides of the Gun, “Better Way” topped the AAA charts in 2006, but the song’s call to stand up for your rights and ideals continues to reverberate. The (Dixie) Chicks…
