Most acoustic guitar players, including working pros and even accomplished singer-songwriters, have a very limited vocabulary of rhythm patterns and grooves. H...
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These lessons are designed to equip you with essential strumming patterns for jamming, accompaniment, cover tunes, and original compositions. And of course, th...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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As country music and country guitar playing become increasingly more popular, there are several techniques that are crucial to capturing that true country sound...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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"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...
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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...
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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...
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Based on the Charlie Parker standard "Confirmation", and featured on my solo guitar recording Indigo, this étude combines a number of exciting harmonic concepts...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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"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 (...
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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...
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