What are advanced acoustic guitar techniques? Tricky approaches like harp or artificial harmonics, bends, and two-handed tapping are all considered advanced techniques, as are percussive effects and complex strumming patterns. These lessons will help advancing guitarists take their playing to the next level.
Add Excitement to Your Fingerstyle Playing with These Advanced Concepts and Techniques
Here are some ways to blend different fingerstyle techniques together to add variety and complexity to your guitar playing.
Find Your Own Musical Voice on Guitar Using Timbre, Dynamics, and Time-Feel
We spend a lot of time trying to find the right notes, or the best words for what we’re trying to say, but how we say something is what helps us leave our mark
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Weekly Workout: Using Triads to Negotiate Seventh Chords
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.
Weekly Workout: Building Colorful Chords from the Harmonic and Melodic Minor Scales
In this advanced guitar lesson, meet the melodic and harmonic minor scales and then explore the harmonies that can be generated from them.
Generating Challenging Picking Exercises From Ninth Chords on Guitar
Let’s take a close look at a common extended chord—containing a note beyond the seventh, the venerable ninth.
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How to Strengthen Your Picking Skills Through Efficient Patterns
In this guitar lesson you'll learn economy picking, which includes alternate and sweep picking styles, as well as legato techniques for your fretting fingers.
Try These Fun and Challenging Counterpoint Exercises on Guitar
Contrapuntal lines are not necessarily intuitive for most guitarists, but the approach is certainly worth the investment and yields dividends equivalent to sonic gold.
Guitar Lesson: Using Augmented Arpeggios to Add Dreamlike Sequences
Lisa Liu teaches fretboard exercises you can use to play beautiful, dreamlike augmented arpeggios for soloing and composing in any style.
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30 Ways to Improve Your Acoustic Guitar Tone
Improve your acoustic guitar tone with these tips and techniques for fretting-hand, flatpicking, and fingerstyle playing for both your right and left hands.
Make the Most of Your Capo: 4 Essential Concepts
When used as a tool—and not merely a crutch—a capo can offer inspiration and creativity for guitar players of all skill levels.
Try These Fun Guitar Exercises to Build Coordination Between Your Fretting and Picking Hands
Take a deep dive into building independence among the fingers of both hands.
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Video Lesson: 5 Ways to Master Artificial Harmonics on Acoustic Guitar
Guitarist Jeff Gunn offers a series of exercises designed to get you used to playing harp harmonics, a technique that produces chime-like tones, on acoustic guitar.
Learn Sweep Picking to Add Excitement To Your Guitar Playing
This technique involves using a plectrum to play a series of single notes on adjacent strings in a consecutive motion, resulting in a fast, fluid sound.
Weekly Workout: How to Use Harmonics to Add Texture to Your Playing
Learn how each type of harmonic—natural, harp, percussive, and pinch—is produced and how it can be used to add textural interest to your guitar playing.
Video Lesson: 5 Steps to Learning Tremolo Picking and Vibrato
Try these picking and exercises to improve your picking technique and precision and make your notes sustain and vibrate.
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How to Play Thirds Up and Down Your Acoustic Guitar Fretboard
Lines based on thirds present great material for picking- and fretting-hand exercises, and also provide a solid foundation for melodic ideas and solos.
Weekly Workout: Build Your Speed by Using More Efficient Fingerings
If you watch the hands of guitarists who play with enviable speed and fluidity, you may notice how little effort they seem to exert. Their finger movements are relaxed and minimal, considering the amount of music they are generating. What they’re playing is surely not easy, but it looks that way. So how does a guitarist achieve that state of grace?
Lesson: Get to Know Your Fretboard
If you'd like to strengthen your knowledge of the fretboard, try viewing it through a handful of different perspectives.
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Video Lesson: Building Solos Around Chord Shapes
Chord shapes are great tools for expanding the range and flexibility of your guitar solos—in any style. They can help you get your bearings up and down the neck and find phrases and riffs that truly lock in with a song’s chord changes.
Video Lesson: Using Horizontal Harmonies to Express Chord Changes
Try these exercises to make your melodies more harmonic and your harmonies more melodic.
Video Lesson: 5 Ways to Strengthen Your Pinky
Just as you would do pushups for upper-body strength or crunches to work on your core, the best way to improve pinky strength is to train it.
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Color Your Chords with Hammer-Ons and Pull-Offs
Enhance your rhythm playing by adding hammer-ons and pull-offs to chords—an essential technique used in all styles on the acoustic guitar.
Guitar + Harmonica: How to “Tongue Block”
Here you'll learn some harmonica basics that will help you blow harp while you keep your guitar chords pulsing.
Video Lesson: How to Use Chord Grips to Generate Great Soloing Ideas
Solos don’t have to be fast or fancy to be effective!
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Video Lesson: Using a Partial Capo Can Open Up New Doors Tonally
If you’re drawn to the creative possibilities of alternate tunings but don’t want to completely lose your bearings on the fingerboard, a partial capo may be just the ticket.