Freddie Green is synonymous with swing guitar. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1911, Green enjoyed a 50-year career holding down the rhythm chair of Count Basie’s famed big band.
As a songwriter, do you stick to your guns and your own songs—or cave and just deliver the hits everyone can sing along with? There’s a healthier way to look at covers: as a creative vehicle that can actually enhance rather than compete with your songwriting.
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.
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