Grateful Dead guitar lessons
Play classic Dead songs on acoustic guitar
“Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers sure can play the music—listen to his ‘Stella Blue’ and you’ll know what I mean. Better still, he can teach it.”
—Dennis McNally, author, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead
Learn Grateful Dead Classics for Acoustic Guitar is an easy-to-follow video series that teaches arrangements of classic Dead songs for acoustic guitar and vocal. Available on DVD or as instant downloads, the videos feature 16 of the Dead’s best songs, with step-by-step instruction and complete guitar tab.
Volume 2
Uncle John’s Band
Touch of Grey
Casey Jones
Eyes of the World
Bird Song
Althea
The Music Never Stopped
Volume 1
Friend of the Devil
Black Peter
Brokedown Palace
Fire on the Mountain
New Speedway Boogie
Cassidy
Stella Blue
Playing Jerry Garcia’s Wolf guitar at Club Passim, Cambridge, Mass.
Musician/journalist Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers grew up playing the music of the Grateful Dead and leads the acoustic collective Dead to the Core. He interviewed both Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir in depth about their guitar and songwriting styles, and draws on insights from those conversations to capture the soul of these timeless songs.
Jeffrey shows you not only how to play the chords and create powerful grooves behind your singing, but also how to add cool embellishments, percussive effects, bass lines, and lead breaks inspired by the Dead’s live and studio performances. These arrangements (in standard, dropped-D, and D A D G A D tuning, using flatpick, fingerstyle, and hybrid picking) are specially designed for intermediate players and are packed with accompaniment ideas that you can use in other songs as well.
Read/watch a Boston Globe feature on JPR’s Grateful Dead guitar workshops.