Chord Camp

Learn how to build powerful chord progressions in this online guitar workshop with Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers—founding editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine and author of Beyond Strumming, The Complete Singer-Songwriter, and other books and videos for musicians.

Chord progressions are essential building blocks of all songs—creating momentum, tension and resolution, familiarity and surprise. At Chord Camp, you’ll learn to harness this power on your guitar, by unlocking how chords work together in progressions.

Over four weekly sessions, we’ll build a vocabulary of chords and progressions, from simple diatonic chords to substituted, borrowed, and extended chords that give songs fresh twists. We will use some accessible theoretical tools to understand chord relationships, but the focus is on how they sound—so in every session we’ll go under the hood of classic songs to reveal the patterns that drive them.

Each week you’ll receive a set of chords to work with—helping you recognize connections between songs and learn them more quickly, and discovering ways to make the progressions in your own songs more distinctive and impactful.

You’ll come away with a library of chord progressions and voicings, along with companion playlists of classic songs. Meeting videos are archived for replay or in case you aren’t able to attend a live session.

The camp is designed for developing guitarists who know basic chords, up through more experienced players looking to deepen their understanding of harmony and song craft.

Questions? Email me.

About the teacher

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers has combined his twin passions for words and music into a multifaceted career as a musician, author, and teacher. He is a grand prize winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, the founding editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine, and author of The Complete Singer-Songwriter, Beyond Strumming, Dynamic Guitar, and many other books and videos for musicians.

A “renowned guitar teacher” (Boston Globe), Rodgers leads workshops on songwriting and guitar at schools and events such as the Passim School of Music, Berklee College of Music, the Woodstock Invitational Luthiers Showcase, Ashokan Acoustic Guitar Camp, and Lamb’s Retreat for Songwriters. For many years he has taught courses on songwriting in the Honors program at Syracuse University.