Explore the haunting sounds of acoustic slide guitar with this complete video guide by David Hamburger.
Learn Jontavious Willis’ Take on “Poor Boy, Long Ways from Home”
An Introduction to Bottleneck Slide
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.
Norman Blake is one of the great unsung heroes of 20th-century folk music. Here's a look at his life, music, and what you can learn from his guitar playing.
What is flatpicking on guitar? Despite the name, it’s more than simply playing with a pick. Flatpicking refers to the acoustic guitar style, heard primarily in the bluegrass and folk idioms, of playing individual notes with a pick to form melodies, solos, and fills.
Contrapuntal lines are not necessarily intuitive for most guitarists, but the approach is certainly worth the investment and yields dividends equivalent to sonic gold.
We looked into a number of the most popular classical-guitar learning sites and offer profiles of three here; at the end you’ll also find brief glimpses of four others.
Matteo Carcassi’s 25 Etudes, Op. 60 are a rite of passage for the advancing classical guitarist. Learn how to flatpick this classic on acoustic guitar.
The amount of options for learning acoustic guitar online can be overwhelming. In this list you'll find apps and websites for learning guitar to help with anything you're working on.
This guitar lesson breaks down the mechanics of string crossing and applies it all to a classical guitar etude by Fernando Sor to help build up picking-hand precision.
Create call-and-response statements using Western swing chords. You’ll learn to play single-note licks on the I chord in the key of A major, answered by different combinations of sixth and ninth chords.
Improve your acoustic guitar tone with these tips and techniques for fretting-hand, flatpicking, and fingerstyle playing for both your right and left hands.
Guitarist Gretchen Menn based this lovely chord-melody guitar arrangement of "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" on a version that vocalist Bing Crosby recorded in 1939.
“As in a painting, the melody should be the subject right up front, close to your eyes, and the bass should be the mountains in the background,” D’Agostino says.
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.
