It can be intimidating to change all the notes that you’ve worked so hard to learn, but the new sounds and new ideas you’ll discover make it worth the effort.
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.
Here we’ll explore flatpicking guitar through some musical examples based on its key practitioners from Doc Watson to Molly Tuttle and identify some of the genre's essential recordings.
Here are some ideas from jazz great Eddie Lang for some new chord melody techniques and textures on guitar, applied to the verse of the old standard “After You’ve Gone.”
In this guitar lesson you'll learn a handful of techniques for making solo guitar arrangements of ballads and trail songs: active bass runs, cross-picking, and hybrid picking.
Bob Dylan's great acoustic guitar playing is often overlooked. Here we showcase his deceptive chord moves, his fluency with standard and non-standard tunings, and his knack for constant reinvention.
“What is good tone? That’s a very good question, but difficult to answer succinctly,” says songwriter and record producer John Leventhal, known for his work with Rosanne Cash, William Bell, and other top artists. “It’s heartfelt and musical. It’s generally a fat tone, I don’t like thin tone. When it…
"Are You Lonesome Tonight" was a big hit for Elvis. For this easy guitar arrangement in the key of G major, we’re going to concentrate on just the main body of the song.
In this guitar lesson, these arrangements of two songs by Mother Maybelle Carter will help develop your technique and understanding of the flatpicking idiom.
In this lesson, Bruce Molsky demonstrates how the guitar tradition from Madagascar takes in not only local music elements but classical and pop influences from everywhere.
Watch Joan Armatrading play "Love and Affection" on her Ovation 12-string guitar, and learn some tips for playing the song with her rich chord voicings.
This arrangement is taken at a relaxed tempo, using a handful of open and first-position chords—C, F, A7, D7, G7—along with a couple more sophisticated but easy-to-play shapes.
Joan Armatrading has followed her own path for 50 years to become one of the most revered songwriters of her generation. Here's an in-depth look at her guitar playing.
You wouldn’t normally think of the work of Irving Berlin as an acoustic guitar campfire song, but in this installment, Berlin’s “What’ll I Do” takes the spotlight.
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.
