How to Best Take Care of Your Guitars—When They’re Not in Your Hands
With a little thought into how you store and display your guitars, you can keep them in optimal shape, ready to receive your ideas when inspiration strikes.
Guitar Lesson: Use Bluegrass Flatpicking to Add Excitement to Your Accompaniments
In this guitar lesson, learn how to use bluegrass flatpicking to add riffs and fills on top of your playing to create the exciting sound of multiple instruments.
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Guitar Wall Mounts, Floor Stands, & More—How to Keep Your Instrument Safe at Home
Cases? Floor stands? Wall mounts? Here's how to keep your acoustic guitars safe and protected at home.
Why Isn’t My Acoustic Guitar Intonating Well, and What Can I Do About It?
Here are some things to check if you notice something is outside of the reasonable range of intonation on your guitar and it’s off enough to bother the ear.
Guitar Basics: How to Build Scales on Acoustic Guitar, Part I (Major Scales)
In this acoustic guitar lesson, Gretchen Menn breaks down the basics of scale formation and shows you how to apply that knowledge to the fretboard.
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Laurence Juber: A DADGAD Lesson with the Fingerstyle Master
Juber is one of the world’s most celebrated fingerstyle guitarists, a two-time Grammy winner, who, over the course of more than two-dozen solo albums, has developed a distinct personal voice on the steel-string acoustic.
Gear Review: Power Pins 2.0 Replacement Bridge Pins
For an objective take with this setup, we recorded the guitar before and after installing the Power Pins, using the same set of fresh strings and the same mic positioning.
Scott Baxendale is ‘Remanufacturing’ Old Harmony and Kay Guitars
His conversion process is centered on replacing ladder-style bracing with his proprietary scalloped X-bracing.
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Great Acoustics: Bourgeois Custom OMC Soloist
Designed by Dana Bourgeois and Eric Schoenberg to be a fingerstyle guitar, the Soloist's unique look gives it a vibe all its own
Glenn Jones’ ‘The Giant Who Ate Himself’ Takes Off from Fahey and Others with Genre-spanning Set
If you ever have to explain the “American primitive” guitar style to someone, just pop Glenn Jones’ The Giant Who Ate Himself into the CD player.
Guitar Talk: Nels Cline Bonds with a Curious Old National
Wilco guitarist and master improviser Nels Cline is drawn to a guitar that’s lived a life and has a story. Each of his instruments seems to have a colorful background, and every time Cline cracks open another case, I get the full rundown on what’s inside.
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Gear Review: Eastman DM1
From a spec-sheet perspective, the DM1 checks all of the right boxes for the Gypsy-jazz fan.
Review: L.R. Baggs Align Series Pedals Are Sonically Focused for Acoustic Guitar Pickups
All pedals in the series mesh well together; they can be used independently and also easily integrated with an existing setup.
‘Rose Room’ — Learn a Swing-Jazz Evergreen and a Charlie Christian Solo
In 1917, the pianist and drummer Art Hickman penned the song “Rose Room,” named after the ballroom in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, where at the time he was leading a band. Jazz aficionados know the 32-bar song through Duke Ellington’s seminal 1932 recording, and also as the…
Learn to Play ‘An Operatic Rag’ — An Accordion Gem for Guitar
Accordion music of the early 20th century might seem an odd source of inspiration for a fingerstyle guitarist, but not for the San Francisco Bay Area musician Craig Ventresco, with his vast musical knowledge of that bygone era. I have long admired Ventresco’s arrangement of “An Operatic Rag,” a 1910…
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Review: Washburn Solo DeLuxe Auditorium and Grand Auditorium
Washburn summons the past and looks to the future with two new guitars.
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?
Laurence Juber’s Solo Acoustic Arrangement of The Beatles’ “Day Tripper”
Though Juber plays the original guitar riff with a bit more finesse than the Beatles did, he maintains the proper spirit and unrelenting groove.