Pete Madsen

1 week ago | acousticguitar.com | Adam Perlmutter |Pete Madsen

Text by Jerry Snyder | Video by Doug Young — Excerpted from Ragtime Guitar Essentials. The roots of ragtime music come from gospel, banjo, and African American folk music traditions, as well as 19th-century European composers. From the late 1890s until around 1917, ragtime music was primarily arranged for the piano.

4 weeks 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.

2 months ago | acousticguitar.com | David Hamburger |Pete Madsen |Adam Perlmutter |Sean McGowan |Sean Mcgowan

Acoustic guitarists in all genres often use alternate tunings. Some of these tunings have become so prevalent that they practically identify their genre—for example, open D or G for slide blues, or DADGAD for Celtic styles. This article will focus on C G D G B E tuning (sometimes known as Hawaiian Wahine slack key), which lends itself well to a variety of styles.

2 months ago | acousticguitar.com | David McCarty |Pete Madsen |Adam Perlmutter |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

“Stay (I Missed You),” Lisa Loeb’s chart topper first released in 1994 with the movie Reality Bites, is in the long lineage of breakup songs, but in many respects is far from a conventional pop song. It has no real chorus and doesn’t even follow a repetitive pattern of verses or other sections, as it goes from a quiet intro to a full-band groove, back and forth several times.

Oct 9, 2024 | acousticguitar.com | Cathy Fink |Pete Madsen |Pat Moran |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

When you’re playing accompaniment, adding or changing just one note in a chord can do so much to enhance and vary the sound. In the last installment of this series on chord embellishment basics, we focused on sus and add chord voicings, which include the second or fourth of the chord. In this lesson we’ll work with a different set of notes that you can use to add bluesy colors to open chord shapes.