-
4 days ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Derk Richardson |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Pat Moran
“Are you floating in the cosmos, finally free from time/ While I’m down here on the highway looking for signs?” asks Heather Maloney in the title track from her new album, Exploding Star, over the light 6/8 strum of her guitar.
-
5 days ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Joey Lusterman |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Adam Perlmutter |Dale Miller
In April 2025, we debuted the Acoustic Guitar Teaching Artist series, a program designed to help you grow as a guitarist. Our cohort of instructors—Isa Burke, Lisa Liu, Sean McGowan, Mamie Minch, and Thu Tran—is committed to helping you discover new musical and creative territory throughout the year, offering one new video lesson each week, plus virtual concerts, roundtable discussions, and more. You can unlock access for just $5 a month.
-
1 week ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Kate Koenig |Adam Perlmutter
One of the great deep cuts from Simon and Garfunkel’s 1970 masterpiece, Bridge Over Troubled Water, “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” taps into the sultry rhythms and jazz harmonies of bossa nova, with a lovely nylon-string guitar part by Paul Simon. When I interviewed Simon for this magazine in 1993, he noted that he must have started listening to Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim around the time he wrote the song.
-
2 weeks ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Adam Perlmutter |Scott Nygaard
To the uninitiated, guitar soloing can be both alluring and a little daunting—it seems to require a whole different kind of knowledge and facility on the fretboard than playing rhythm does. While it’s true that solos can be fast and complex, they certainly don’t have to be. You can build great, musically satisfying solos from very simple elements, just as you can create great songs from just a few chords.
-
2 weeks ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Greg Ruby |Adam Perlmutter |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Paul Mehling
The joy I felt strumming my first open G chord was liberating. My fingers fell into place, and the sound was big, bold, and powerful. At 12, I was convinced I could play guitar quickly and easily. Soon, I was switching between open chords, leaving behind the formality of seven years of piano lessons—I was a guitarist! Who needed written music or note names?
-
3 weeks ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Greg Olwell |Greg Cahill |Mark Small
On May 1, 2025, the singer-songwriter world lost one of its most irrepressible and beloved free spirits when Jill Sobule died in a house fire while on tour in Minnesota. Sobule, 66, was best known, in her own words, as a “two-hit wonder”: for “I Kissed a Girl,” from 1995, the first overtly gay-themed song to reach the Top 20 (13 years before Katy Perry’s song of the same title); and “Supermodel,” featured in the Clueless movie soundtrack.
-
1 month ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Mimi Fox |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Mary Flower |Dylan Schorer
I’ve always loved how a simple melody can open the door to so many musical possibilities. The concept of theme and variations has been around for centuries, from classical composers to jazz improvisers, and it’s something I naturally gravitate toward in my own playing.
-
1 month ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Adam Perlmutter |Maurice Tani |Danny Carnahan
The title track from Jason Isbell’s new solo acoustic album, Foxes in the Snow, is one of its happiest—an unabashed celebration of love and intimacy amid many songs that traverse much darker emotional terrain. Set to a bouncy minor-key groove, “Foxes in the Snow” also features some fine picking and is very fun to play, with a melodic solo that could stand on its own as an instrumental.
-
1 month ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Greg Olwell |Michael Simmons |Adam Perlmutter
Jason Isbell owns some prized vintage guitars, such as a 1934 Martin 000-28 that he calls the best acoustic guitar he’s ever played. But when it came to recording his solo acoustic album Foxes in the Snow, he turned to this smaller and plainer Martin 0-17, a recent acquisition from Retrofret Vintage Guitars in Brooklyn, New York. Listed at $30, the 0-17 was nearly the bottom of the line in Martin’s 1940 catalog—only the 0-15, a very similar model with a less glossy finish, was cheaper, at $25.
-
1 month ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Adam Perlmutter |Pete Madsen |David Surette |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
Sue Foley is both a guitarist and a scholar, and she was kind enough to create this exclusive lesson, breaking down key techniques from some of the musicians she celebrates on One Guitar Woman. In Example 1, Foley demonstrates the Carter scratch, a technique pioneered by Maybelle Carter in which the guitarist plays single-note melodies on the bass strings while adding chordal accents on the upper strings.
