Category: Lessons

The Latest

Unlock New Sounds with a Partial Capo

Like a magic trick on your guitar, partial capos hold down some strings while leaving others untouched, changing the intervals between open strings.

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers January 9, 2024

Learn “Sidh Beag, Sidh Mor,” a Traditional Celtic Song Arranged in Standard Tuning

Most of this arrangement’s melody notes are reachable without leaving first position, and all the necessary bass notes are easily played.

Al Petteway December 29, 2023

Special Focus: How to Practice

A Simple Plan to Make the Most of Your Guitar Practice Time

Editor's Picks

Adam Perlmutter is the editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine and has written hundreds of articles, reviews, and song introductions (as well as expertly engraving and transcribing the music for a comparable number of lessons and compositions.)

It’s impossible to choose favorites, but here are a few lessons he’s worked on recently and suggests you check out.

Get to know Adam and the rest of the team better here.

Explore Our Guitar Lessons by Style, Technique, or Topic

All Lessons and Songs to Play

Video Lesson: 6 Tips For Acoustic Fingerpicking Blues Guitar

Learn to combine the bass and treble voices in your fingerpicked blues to add complexity.

Pete Madsen
August 17, 2016

Reignite Your Love for Guitar: 6 Ways to Bust Out of Your Rut

From the October 2016 issue of Acoustic Guitar | BY PAULINE FRANCE If you’re past the honeymoon phase with your guitar, chances are you’ve experienced a love-hate relationship with it at some point—and that’s OK. Maybe you’re frustrated because you can’t learn fast enough, or perhaps you’re just bored with playing the…

Acoustic Guitar Editors
August 17, 2016

Video Lesson: Learn to Play Guitar Chord Melodies Like Chet Atkins or Earl Klugh

Learning to play chord-melody style—that is, expressing melodies in chords rather than single notes—is a formidable and valuable skill.

Ron Jackson
August 17, 2016

Music Basics for Acoustic Guitarists: 5 Tips for Keeping Solid Time

Learn to keep a steady, uninterrupted pulse.

Ruth Parry
August 14, 2016

Acoustic Guitar Gospel Blues: The Devil’s in the Details

This groove-heavy gospel-blues song is a lil’ bit of heaven and a lil’ bit of hell. “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” is one of many songs that collide at the intersection of gospel and blues history. As musician/pastor Reverend Elijah Ott describes it, “To me there’s two kinds of music.…

Orville Johnson
August 11, 2016

Learn to Play ‘Crazy Blues,’ the First Mega-Hit Blues Record [VIDEO]

The 1920 recording of “Crazy Blues,” on the Okeh label, by Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds, is often cited as the first blues record. While that may be debatable, it was the first blues 78 rpm to sell a million copies. It eventually sold over two million copies and…

Orville Johnson
July 25, 2016

Screwing up on Stage and Studio Musicians Tips Stringletter Performance Stage Practice

Screwing Up Onstage! Everyone Does it, Here’s How to Recover

Any player who’s put in a good amount of time onstage will most likely have a collection of train wrecks to tell about—

Adam Perlmutter
July 20, 2016

Photograph of Ron Jackson wearing a suit, seated on the floor with his acoustic guitar balanced across one knee.

Video Lesson: Four Ways to Silence Your Guitar Strings

Explore four solutions and subtle technique adjustments to deal with unwanted, distracting string noise when you play guitar.

Ron Jackson
July 18, 2016

Video Lesson: Spice Up Your Guitar Playing With Jazz-Style Harmonic Flavors

The concepts taught in this Weekly Workout will help you play with new depth and excitement.

Ron Jackson
July 17, 2016

Illustration of Robert Johnson with guitar.

Video Lesson: Reimagining Bluesman Robert Johnson in Open-G Tuning

Take a look at some of the songs Robert Johnson played in open tunings and learn how to use his melodic and rhythmic ideas in any 12-bar blues.

Pete Madsen
July 16, 2016

Video Lesson: How to Silence Your Strings for Musical Effect

The first job of playing acoustic guitar is to make those strings ring, with a clear and rich tone. The second is to make them stop.

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
June 16, 2016

Weekly Workout: How to Pick Like Jazz-Great George Benson

Learn the secrets behind George Benson's special way way with the plectrum to improve your own picking technique.

Ron Jackson
June 16, 2016

Create Simple Blues Solos by Adding Thirds to Your Blues Lines

Playing solos using scales is great, but that’s just the beginning. One way to flesh out the sound of scales is by adding intervals on an adjacent string to create simple harmonies.

Pete Madsen
June 8, 2016

Photograph of fingerstyle guitarist John Doyle.

John Doyle Shares 7 Ways to Improve Your Celtic Guitar Playing

Celtic guitar master John Doyle took some time out from the recent Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow, Scotland, to offer tips on improving your Celtic guitar playing. Doyle will have a new solo album on Compass Records towards the end of the year. Different tunings “My advice is that you…

Andy Hughes
May 26, 2016

Weekly Workout: Tone is in the Hands—and Here’s How to Find It

Whatever style you prefer—and regardless of whether you’re more of a soloist or accompanist—you should learn how to get these techniques under your fingers.

Ron Jackson
May 24, 2016

The Way You Approach Music in Practice Greatly Affects Your Success in Performance

Even if your playing in the practice room sounds good, you need to practice and learn the piece in a manner robust enough to withstand the pressure of onstage performance.

Louise Lee
May 10, 2016

Learn a Simple Arrangement of ‘Sloop John B’

An ancient folk song chronicling boating misadventures, “Sloop John B” was transformed into a chamber-pop classic when the Beach Boys recorded the tune and released it on their groundbreaking 1966 album Pet Sounds. Before then, the song—originally called “The John B. Sails”—had traveled far and wide. It originated in the…

Greg Cahill
May 9, 2016

Learn to Play Gypsy-Jazz Favorite ‘Swing Gitan’

I first heard “Swing Gitan” backstage at a Djangofest jam between some younger players in Seattle, who were playing it as if they themselves had written it! (That’s true of Gypsy-jazz players, many who really get inside every song they play). It’s a great vehicle for the showy, virtuosic style…

Paul Mehling
May 4, 2016

Video Lesson: Express Yourself Through Slurs, Bends, and Vibrato

One of the best ways to add an expressive character to your playing is through the use of slurs (slides, hammer-ons, and pull-offs), bends, and vibrato. So much of the vocal quality guitar players like to emulate comes from the fret-hand manipulation of the strings. In this lesson, you’ll take the A minor pentatonic scale and use it to create musical phrases that allow you to manipulate the strings using these various techniques.

Pete Madsen
April 24, 2016

Peggy Seeger on The Child Ballads—Learn ‘O the Wind & Rain’

[Editor’s note] Peggy Seeger is no stranger to folklore. Her father was the famed folklorist Charles Seeger; her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a trailblazing avant-garde composer. Her folk musician brother, Mike Seeger, co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers, one of the most influential groups in the 1960s folk revival.…

Andy Hughes
April 23, 2016

Going Beyond Drop-D

Here is a way to get some of that alternate-tuning mojo without straying too far from what you know

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
April 15, 2016

bluesman Robert Johnson seated holding acoustic guitar

Video Lesson: Learn to Play Robert Johnson-Inspired, A-Major Based Blues

For this lesson, I’ve written a Johnson-inspired blues in A major that teaches you the typical intro, walkdown, fills, verses, and guitar break he used in songs.

Tom Feldmann
April 14, 2016

Video Lesson: Learn to Play ‘God’s Gonna Ease My Troublin’ Mind’

I first heard this spiritual number on an album called Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s, released in the late 1960s on the Folkways label. Ashley was a banjo player, singer, and entertainer who had played medicine shows, frolics, concerts, and dances throughout North Carolina. That collection of tunes featured…

Orville Johnson
April 4, 2016

guitar being played with slide on pinky viewed from the soundhole up the neck

How to Play Slide Guitar: Bottleneck Basics

At its best, slide guitar playing combines economical phrasing with special attention to pitch and tone.

Steve James
March 25, 2016

Video Lesson: How to Play in Waltz Time, from ‘Edelweiss’ to ‘Sweet Baby James’

Songs in 3/4 can sound sweet on acoustic guitar, especially when you go beyond a basic one-two-three waltz rhythm and take a more nuanced approach to picking patterns, chord voicings, and bass lines.

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
March 17, 2016

About Acoustic Guitar lessons. Learning to play the guitar takes more than just figuring out what fingers go on which frets and which strings to pluck or pick. You need to absorb these mechanics, for sure, but you also need to know how different techniques fit together and how you can put them to use in service of making music with soul and spirit. Memorizing your favorite players’ licks and arrangements is an essential part of the process, too, but all that work doesn’t truly pay off until you’ve internalized the moves and made them your own. The players and teachers whose words and music are shared on this site understand these facets of learning and offer unique, in-depth lessons. Here, you’ll find riffs and exercises, full songs to play, technique tips, listening suggestions, and advice on how to practice as well as what to practice. We’ve been publishing high-quality guitar lessons since 1990, written and developed by some of the best guitar teachers around.