Weekly Workout

Jane Miller seated teaching a weekly workout lesson on her acoustic guitar, photographed in a studio with a microphone in front and a grand piano in the background.

The Weekly Workout is a series of monthly exercises made up of interesting technical workouts that will get your fretting- and picking-hand fingers working in different ways, and offer musical studies that will help you visualize and explore the fingerboard.

Collections of Weekly Workouts organized by topic and technique are available to download in the Acoustic Guitar store for a year's worth of guitar lesson workouts that promise to engage your fingers as well as your mind.

In every lesson available here, you’ll get a different guitar exercise to work on for each week of the month, as well as a few extra variations and extended practice ideas.

Cathy Fink holding acoustic guitar American Roots Licks for Warming Up or Composing

Weekly Workout: Try These American Roots Licks for Warming Up or Composing

Grammy Award-winning roots musician Cathy Fink teaches licks drawn from folk, country, and bluegrass.

ron jackson seated with a guitar

Weekly Workout: Building Colorful Chords from the Harmonic and Melodic Minor Scales

In this advanced lesson, meet the melodic and harmonic minor scales and explore the harmonies that can be generated from them.

ron jackson posing with his acoustic guitar pointed headstock first towards the camera

Weekly Workout: Add Jazzy Walking Bass Lines to Your Accompaniments

Learn how to play walking bass lines with chords—a cool approach to have up your sleeve, no matter what style you play.

black and white photograph of a one-man band

Weekly Workout: Building Dynamic Song Arrangements

Even if you’re accompanying a song with one guitar, you can create the same kind of journey on your instrument that a full band arrangement would.

Jeff Gunn close up demonstrating how to play harmonics on acoustic guitar neck

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.

Jane Miller seated teaching a weekly workout lesson on her acoustic guitar, photographed in a studio with a microphone in front and a grand piano in the background.

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.

sean mcgowan wearing chambray shirt with gray studio backdrop, demonstrating lesson material on his acoustic guitar

Improve Your Technique by Practicing ‘Broken Thirds’ Scales

Scales are great for warming up and improving technical proficiency. Challenge yourself with new scales and patterns.

photograph of scott nygaard in a plaid shirt demonstrating a chord position on acoustic guitar

Learn How to Navigate the Modulations in Circle-of-Fifths Progressions

Explore two ways to practice chord positions in common circle-of-fifths progressions.

close up photograph showing three fingers on a guitar neck playing a Gmaj9 chord

Video Lesson: Generating Challenging Picking Exercises From Ninth Chords

Let’s take a close look at a common extended chord—containing a note beyond the seventh, the venerable ninth.

photograph of scott nygaard and dan gabel sitting side-by-side with their acoustic guitars ready to play

Weekly Workout: Chord Scales

Practice playing chord scales using the chord progression for the first eight bars of the jazz standard "Autumn Leaves."