Explore Open-D Tuning with Mary Flower’s Colorful Arrangement of “Dink’s Song”
With its simple, movable chord shapes—many requiring just two fingers—open-D tuning adds a shimmering quality to this traditional song.
Mary Flower
Award-winning guitarist Mary Flower hosts the Blues in the Gorge guitar camp and has recorded numerous CDs and instructional DVDs.
Learn to Play Mary Flower’s ‘Waltz,’ a Jazzy Roots Piece in Dropped D Tuning
“Most of the time I have no idea how the music comes from my fingertips while writing. It’s not like I’m going for some genre or sound. It just happens!”
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Beginning Fingerpicking: How to Play Melody and Bass Lines at the Same Time
Guitarist Mary Flower demonstrates how to play melodies and bass notes at the same time on acoustic guitar via an exercise she calls "Nimble Fingers."
An Easy Introduction to Playing Thumb-Driven Monotonic Bass Lines on Guitar
In this guitar lesson, learn to play a monotonic bass line, then apply it separately to three chords in the basic 12-bar blues progression.
Ease into Alternate Tuning with This Open D Minor Blues Guitar Lesson
In this guitar lesson, get a taste of open tunings by lowering your strings to open D minor, then playing a handful of chord shapes and applying them to a bluesy etude.
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Video Lesson: An Easy Introduction to the Sophisticated Art of Ragtime Guitar
For a gentle introduction to ragtime, I composed a simple G-major instrumental, “Davis Street Rag,” in which the syncopation always occurs in a predictable place, the “and” of beat three.
Woodshed: Learn Mary Flower’s ‘Liberal Rag’
In this lesson, I’ll show you how to play an approachable ragtime piece of mine in open G6 called “Liberal Rag,” a title I chose not necessarily as a political statement but to indicate that it can be played at an easy and relaxed tempo, by players at all levels.
Video Lesson: Blues Five Ways
In the following exercises, you’ll find some great phrases and chord patterns that make extensive use of the dead-thumb approach.
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Lesson: How to Play the Guitar Rag ‘Jitters’
Often called Piedmont guitar—after the East Coast regions, running from Virginia to North Carolina, where many of the players lived—this challenging style makes use of an upbeat fingerpicking technique, which I’ll break down for you in this lesson.
