Syracuse Acoustic Guitar Project

This year's Acoustic Guitar Project show features local songwriters Lauren Wallace and Taylor Ricks, Corey Paige, William James Nicholson, Zoë Mullan-Stout, and Austin MacRae.

The Acoustic Guitar Project is an international songwriting project that originated in New York City and has spread around the world, from Amsterdam to Asheville, Havana to Hanoi, Minneapolis to Moscow, and São Paulo to...Syracuse.

In each city, a guitar circulates from songwriter to songwriter, and each person has one week to write a song on that guitar, capture it on a handheld recorder, sign their names to the guitar and pass it along.

This year's artists have been announced online as they have completed their songs. check out their songs and what they had to say about participating. On November 5^th, each will perform the new songs (as well as other originals) in a unique concert presented by the Syracuse Acoustic Guitar Project and Folkus.  

The Syracuse Acoustic Guitar project began in in 2014, curated by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, with a guitar handmade in Maryland by Minor Bird Instruments. To date, 40 songs have been written on the Syracuse guitar.

The project was created to help musicians reconnect to the original moment that inspired them to be singer/songwriters. Rodgers says the beauty of the project is its spontaneity. Songwriters may go into the project thinking they’ll write a particular kind of song, but often finish the week with a drastically different creation. Join us as we listen to where the guitar takes them. 

“We’re definitely one of the smaller places [with an Acoustic Guitar Project] out there but I feel like the music scene here can hold its own against the music scene in all these much larger places.”

--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, Acoustic Guitar Project curator, quoted in Syracuse New Times