10 acoustic blues fingerpicking patterns

Richard Barrett is on a mission to make you a better blues player – with full audio examples and backing tracks

The month’s best guitar music – a hand-picked selection of the finest fretwork on wax

ONE OF MY biggest musical influences is the king of blues power, Albert King. There are so many things that define his unique approach to playing, and I think about these things every time I pick up m

TODAY I'D LIKE to talk about downpicking — picking or strumming consecutive downstrokes — and why it can be so musically effective. This is something I learned from studying the riff-writing style of

OVER THE LAST two columns, I’ve demonstrated a handful of what I consider to be essential “blues approved” licks that work well both as embellishments to rhythm parts or as phrases within a solo. Our

THEY SAY WISDOM comes with age, but in the case of 18-year-old Irish singer and guitarist Muireann Bradley, there’s an indisputable maturity at the very forefront of her recordings. She independently