-
1 week 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.
-
1 month 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.
-
1 month 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.
-
Aug 27, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Andrew DuBrock |Jeff Gunn |Jamie Stillway |Pete Madsen
There are several ways to approach learning bottleneck slide guitar. The natural inclination is to focus on one string, allowing the slide to do what it does best: deliver a vocal-like quality with the freedom of movement that stretches the 12 semi-tone octave range to a wider spectrum of microtonal possibilities.
-
Aug 18, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Pete Madsen |Nick Grizzle |Mark Small
From the first notes of Laura Snowden’s March 2024 concert for the Boston Classical Guitar Society, it was clear that the audience was not in for a typical recital.
-
May 12, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Pete Madsen |Mary Flower |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Doug Young
The legendary classical guitar virtuoso Andrés Segovia famously described the guitar as a small orchestra, and generations of steel-string guitarists, armed with six strings and ten fingers, have pursued and expanded that potential. A range of fingerstyle techniques has allowed these musicians to function like a complete band, creating independent melodies, bass lines, harmony, and even percussion on a single guitar.
-
Apr 14, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | David Hamburger |Mary Flower |Steve James |Pete Madsen
If you’re like most guitarists, you started to solo by learning the minor pentatonic or blues scale. But after a while, running the blues scale up and down got to sounding like, well, just playing a scale. In this lesson, I’ll teach you how to add variety to your playing by using the open strings in combination with notes of the minor pentatonic and blues scales.
-
Mar 29, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Pete Madsen |Alberto Lombardi |David Surette |Kevin Owens
We had a great time hanging out with Adam Levy and Ethan Sherman, the authors of String Theories – Tips, Challenges, and Reflections for the Lifelong Guitarist and Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, author of Dynamic Guitar – More Tools to Go Beyond Strumming. Watch this replay video for an engaging discussion about these new books and the process of writing and developing instructional materials for guitarists.
-
Mar 13, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Pete Madsen |Adam Perlmutter
Julian Lage is widely celebrated for his seemingly limitless technique on both the acoustic and electric guitar, as well as his sheer inventiveness as an improviser and composer. But the beauty of his steel-string tone—especially apparent on 2015’s World’s Fair and his most recent Blue Note album, Speak to Me—seems to attract less attention. Lage gives a hint as to how he achieves that sound in this five-minute lesson that he filmed exclusively for AG, a sort of follow-up to this article.
