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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.
We talked to a group of artists and educators who share their favorite exercises, strategies, and tricks for helping get beyond the comfort zone and discover new territory on the guitar.
The capo is a small but powerful tool for guitarists that raises the notes of the open strings but retains the individual relationships between strings. Here's how to use one.
Guitarist and W.C. Handy scholar Jon Shain shares strategies for adapting ragtime pieces for fingerstyle guitar using the 1917 Handy song "Beale Street Blues" as an example.
Learn to use three-note, three-string triads — you probably already know a lot of these chords, and in this lesson, you’ll find ways to repurpose them.
"Fortune Turns the Wheel" is simple, and the sung melody needs little in the way of instrumental propulsion, so the guitar setting is spare in this arrangement.
Reverend Gary Davis is widely celebrated as a genius of blues fingerpicking. In this guitar lesson, Ernie Hawkins, who studied with him, teaches his style.
Learn to create a solo that has a certain kind of connectedness and unity, because it’s based around some related ideas instead of just whatever lick you happen to come up with at the moment.
Learn to play this expressive and understated flatpicking guitar rendition of the classic tune “Cumberland Gap,” from Courtney Hartman’s 2016 Nothing We Say.
This Weekly Workout will help you develop your frame of mind and confidence in solo fingerstyle improvisation on guitar via Tárrega's “Etude in E minor.”
This classic song captures the ethos of the early hippie era and is played in the key of A minor, with a capo at the fourth fret causing the music to sound in C# minor.
Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers shares three new solo guitar arrangements of Christmas Carols: "What Child Is This?," "O Little Town of Bethlehem," and "Jingle Bells."
If your child (or grandchild or other kid in your life) has expressed an interest in playing guitar, you may be wondering if they’re too young to begin lessons.
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.
