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2 months ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Alan Barnosky |David Hamburger |Adam Perlmutter |Greg Ruby
In the late 1930s, 16-year-old Barney Kessel met his musical hero, swing guitar legend Charlie Christian. When Kessel asked Christian for advice, Christian said, “The main thing is to concentrate on swing first. Then, if you can make some interesting harmony after you know how to swing, that’s fine. But to begin with, swing alone is enough to get you by.” Evidently, Kessel took Christian’s advice, as he went on to become a jazz guitar legend in his own right. But what did Christian mean by swing?
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
acousticguitar.com | Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Danny Carnahan |Alan Barnosky |Adam Perlmutter
In 1908, song collector and writer Nathan Howard “Jack” Thorp (1867–1940) published Songs of the Cowboys, a pivotal collection that helped establish the Western song repertoire. Thorp opened the book with “Little Joe the Wrangler,” a song inspired by an event he witnessed on the range. In his autobiography, Pardner of the Wind, Thorp recalls meeting Black cowboys in the camp of Addison Jones, one of the Southwest’s few Black ranch foremen.
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Jan 5, 2025 | 
acousticguitar.com | Alan Barnosky
While flatpicking is often associated with single-note lines, one of its trademark techniques is combining melody and chords for a unified sound. In a full bluegrass band, pickers typically stick to fast lines that cut through the mix, but when playing solo or in small groups, they’ll add more harmony to flesh out the sound. Working chords into a melody line is a difficult concept to master, but with some practice, it can be transformative.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Alan Barnosky |Adam Perlmutter
Steve Baughman stands out in the fingerstyle guitar world as both a technical innovator and a soulful interpreter of traditional music. Known for his mastery of open tunings like Orkney (C G C D G C) and open D (D A D F# A D), he blends Celtic influences with American roots traditions in his unique and idiosyncratic arrangements. His playing is not just complex—it’s storytelling, weaving melodies in a way that makes the guitar truly sing.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Adam Perlmutter |Alan Barnosky
Dudley Hill was an eclectic guitarist from Washington state, well known among traditional swing and gypsy jazz circles, and a founding member of the internationally celebrated band Pearl Django. A wide net of esteemed guitarists have praised Hill’s playing, including Scott Nygaard, who called him “one of the best guitarists I’ve known,” and Greg Ruby, who told me, “He could swing like nobody else.” But before becoming involved in the jazz scene, Hill was first a flatpicker.
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Oct 20, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Ron Forbes-Roberts |Alan Barnosky |Jeff Gunn |Ron Jackson
One of my favorite rhythm guitar approaches is the one that the late jazz master Freddie Green pioneered in his work with the Count Basie Orchestra. Throughout his 50 years on the gig, Green played an acoustic archtop, unamplified. Though his strumming was sometimes more felt than heard, it contributed so much to Basie’s signature sound and swing. Green’s style—quarter-note strums in 4/4 time (aka “four to the floor”)—seems simple enough. But it’s rarely mastered.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | David Hamburger |Craig Havighurst |Jamie Stillway |Alan Barnosky
“Soldier’s Joy” is a well-known traditional tune, particularly favored by fiddle and mandolin players because much of the melody can be easily played in one position across two strings. However, on guitar it can be a lot more difficult. A two-string passage on a fiddle becomes a four-string cross-picking workout for us. Cross picking is a tough feat even at slow tempos, and “Soldier’s Joy” is almost always played fast.
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Jul 28, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Hiroya Tsukamoto |Greg Cahill |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Alan Barnosky
“The Water Is Wide” is an old Scottish song, first published by the English folk song collector, scholar, and composer Cecil Sharp in the 1906 collection Folk Songs from Somerset. The tune was popularized in the United States after Pete Seeger recorded a version during the folk revival of the 1950s, and there have been a number of other great covers by the likes of Joan Baez, Eva Cassidy, and James Taylor.
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Jul 21, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Scott Nygaard |Adam Perlmutter |Alan Barnosky
Playing with others is perhaps the most fun part of flatpicking. There is a common repertoire of tunes, and musicians at all skill levels who have never met before can sit down and play them together—creating joyous sounds for pickers and audience members alike. One of the most well-known jam tunes out there is “Old Joe Clark,” originally a mountain folk song dating back to 19th-century Kentucky.
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Jul 10, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Alan Barnosky
In traditional music circles like bluegrass, old-time, Celtic, and others, jams are an opportunity for like-minded musicians to gather in public spaces and take joy in creating the music they love. These genres rarely sell out venues or top the charts. Instead, the fans are often instrumentalists themselves, pre-serving the music by playing it in their local communities and teaching it to newcomers, who then carry the traditions onward.
