Adam Rafferty is an American fingerstyle guitarist, composer, and arranger born in New York City and raised in Harlem. Trained in classical guitar at SUNY Purchase and steeped in jazz (having worked with musicians associated with Dizzy Gillespie and Lou Donaldson), he later pivoted to acoustic fingerstyle arranging after discovering Tommy Emmanuel’s playing around 2007. He is known for intricate solo-guitar arrangements of pop, soul, and R&B songs (Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and others) that combine simultaneous bass lines, melody, and chordal accompaniment, often blended with percussive tapping and beatboxing techniques.

Rafferty is a significant figure in the modern fingerstyle-guitar-arrangement movement popularized on YouTube, and many classical and acoustic guitarists perform his published arrangements and instructional method books as a bridge between pop repertoire and solo guitar technique.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Rafferty_(musician)