Most acoustic guitar players, including working pros and even accomplished singer-songwriters, have a very limited vocabulary of rhythm patterns and grooves. H...
These lessons are designed to equip you with essential strumming patterns for jamming, accompaniment, cover tunes, and original compositions. And of course, th...
Anyone can write a song! And that’s exactly what you will do with Write Your First Song, an extraordinarily intuitive step-by-step guide from singer-songwriter...
Supporting a songwriter as the sideman in a duo or band situation is an artful skill that can be very challenging. Usually, there’s a rhythm guitarist -- perha...
I’ll show you creative fingerstyle approaches to spark songwriting ideas and excite your guitar playing. In the upcoming performances I'll be giving you a coup...
Here's the acorn to the oak tree story of my song, "The Innocence and the Afterlife". This song came from the guitar first. It was a Celtic styled pattern I fe...
I used to wonder how people who played in various open tunings could remember the chords, fingerings, and notes when going from one tuning to another. It seemed...
As country music and country guitar playing become increasingly more popular, there are several techniques that are crucial to capturing that true country sound...
Playing One Chord:
If you think about it, this skill is one of the most fundamental and basic of all we do on the guitar, and one of the most important to mast...
A rite of passage for all aspiring blues guitar players occurs when they first move beyond their primary influences and discover the guitarists that influenced ...
When teaching my students how to properly practice or giving a workshop on practicing, the first thing I discuss is a concept I call “Set Up Your Practicing So ...
"Cannonball Rag" is known as The Thumbpicker's National Anthem (or so it's called in the picking circles). There have been a lot of versions of this recorded, b...
This piece, called "Karen", is named after Karen Carpenter, who I'm a fan of. She did things that were considered pop that I actually grew up with, using 50's p...
The words Haba Na Haba are from a proverb, which translates to "little by little your pot will be filled." Essentially, the saying means if you take things litt...
Based on the Charlie Parker standard "Confirmation", and featured on my solo guitar recording Indigo, this étude combines a number of exciting harmonic concepts...
This is an old traditional tune I learned from the listening to Tony Rice and Norman Blake. In the late 80’s they released two albums together with guitar and v...
Everybody knows that the blues comes out of the south, and was played on acoustic instruments. Then the blues migrated to the cities, and the urbanization of th...
There’s a real art to playing rhythm guitar. Creating the perfect rhythm part, staying in the pocket with the rhythm section, staying consistent throughout the ...
I ran across the original lead sheet for this song recently. It was called "Room 314" - Why? I have no idea. I don't know if that was a hotel room I was in when...
Well alright everybody, let’s solo over a modern country track in the key of C! This one has a real meaty feel to it and I think you're going to have a lot of f...
This is an 8 Bar blues tune in C with more advanced use of alternating bass techniques. There's a cool B section that gets us moving around the neck a bit as we...
This tune is called "Highlands", and it's from my record I'm Tired. It uses one of the most common chord changes in popular music, the I-V-VIm-IV. It shows us h...
"All the Things You Are" is a song composed by Jerome Kern with lyrics written by Oscar Hammerstein II. The song was written for the musical Very Warm for May (...
I love how the call-and-response approach allows you to reference more of an ensemble sound. More than just putting a few licks over a steady bass, you can star...
