5 Ways to Transform an Acoustic Guitar Into Your Songwriting Partner
The guitar can do much more than accompany your voice and fill in the chords—it can spark ideas and help guide you throughout the process of developing them into complete songs
Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, founding editor of Acoustic Guitar, is a grand prize winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and author of The Complete Singer-Songwriter, Beyond Strumming, and other books and videos for musicians. In addition to his ongoing work with AG, he offers live workshops for guitarists and songwriters, plus video lessons, song charts, and tab, on Patreon.
Lesson: Create Fresh Sounds with a Keyboard-inspired Approach to the Acoustic Guitar
The sound is quite different from a percussive strum or arpeggio—it’s more like a piano, with your fingers taking the role of the hammers striking the strings.
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Q&A: Graham Nash Talks New Album and Why ‘CSN and CSNY Is Over’
Along with his fruitful new songwriting partnership with Shane Fontayne, Nash remains prolific as a visual artist—especially with his first love, photography.
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.
Q&A: Mary Chapin Carpenter Talks Songwriting, Beating Writer’s Block, and Alternate Tunings
"Looking back is not the same as looking forward,” sings Mary Chapin Carpenter over the resonant ring of her low-tuned flattop guitar.
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Read an In-Depth Q&A with Pete Seeger from the Archives
Before his death in 2014, AG interviewed Pete Seeger about his life and influence on contemporary folk music for its July 2002 cover story. Below is that interview in full: by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers Few individuals have enriched our musical…
Going Beyond Drop-D
Here is a way to get some of that alternate-tuning mojo without straying too far from what you know
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.
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John Doyle Shows You How to Play Celtic Guitar
I met up with Doyle at a Philadelphia-area house concert where, joined by fiddler Duncan Wickel, he performed a stunning show that displayed the full range of his powers on guitar, from rollicking rhythm to beautifully melodic fingerstyle (actually played with a pick and one finger). Before the show, the easygoing virtuoso sat down with his left-handed Muiderman flattop to shed light on how he honors and stretches tradition as a guitarist and songwriter.
Quiles and Cloud Put a Soulful Spin on Americana [Video]
By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers On a courtyard stage at the FreshGrass festival in western Massachusetts, Quiles and Cloud gather around a single microphone. Maria Quiles (pronounced key-less) sways in her batik skirt, singing lead and playing fingerstyle rhythm on a…
Video Lesson: How to Unlock I-IV-V Chord Progressions
The chord trinity known as I–IV–V is one of the most useful theoretical concepts for any musician. The I–IV–V is a skeleton key for countless songs in folk, country, rock, blues, and beyond, revealing the basic similarities of, say, “Louie Louie,” “Ring of Fire,” “Man of Constant Sorrow,” and “I Fought the Law.”
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Play like the Allman Brothers and Neil Young with Flatted III, VI, and VII Chords
If you’re working on a song that uses the I, IV, and V, try substituting the bVII for the V to give the progression a different feel.
Kaki King’s Stage Guitars
In her recent interview in Acoustic Guitar Kaki King talked about a few of her favorite guitars and how they affect her compositions.
Jason Mraz Talks About Playing Nylon-String Guitar, Songwriting Games, and the Importance of Wordplay
Jason Mraz is a certified international pop star these days, with multiplatinum sales and a string of hit singles, but his heart is in the coffeehouse. For proof, just spin his 2001 album Live at Java Joe’s, which captures Mraz with percussionist Toca Rivera at the storied Southern California venue that also helped launch the career of Jewel. On that small stage, Mraz is in his element—singing and scatting through jazzy pop songs, nimbly grooving on acoustic guitar, delivering rapid-fire lyrics full of verbal mischief, and riffing off the crowd like a stand-up comic. In the years since, his instrumental palette and his audience has grown immensely thanks to songs like “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry),” the reggae-tinged “I’m Yours,” and “Lucky” with Colbie Caillat (for a transcription, see page 54), but the basic elements are the same. Strip away the production, and you have a guy with an acoustic guitar who thrives on the no-frills live experience.