The musician, author, inventor and record producer John Pearse is a name that most people will know if they ever played an acoustic stringed instrument — whether it be the guitar, ukulele, mandolin, dulcimer, banjo or balalaika. In an internet age it is hard to recollect or imagine how difficult it was to obtain information about how to play an instrument in the early days of the postwar folk music movement. Instrument tuition books were rarities second only to songbooks in their influence. Pearse’s BBC series Hold Down A Chord was television’s first guitar tuition series.

In 1948 Pete Seeger set the gold standard with his best-selling How to Play the Five-String Banjo. With the arrival of skiffle and rock’n’roll in the 1950s, there was a need for new tutors. Bob Cort’s Making the Most of Skiffle (circa 1957) and Terry Gould’s Folk-Guitar Tutor — A New Method (1960) were among those that appeared. But all paled beside Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day (1957) — which went on to sell millions in its various language editions, teaching budding guitarists the basics and the confidence to get on stage with a handful of chords. Hold Down A Chord and its much reprinted book tie-in (1968) turned Pearse into the Bert Weedon of the folk guitar.

Pearse was born in Hook in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and took up the guitar seriously under the influence of the US bluesman Big Bill Broonzy in 1957. His repertoire reflected his early role models such as Libba Cotten, Mississippi John Hurt and the Rev Gary Davis. Building on this foundation, over the years he wove in jazz, West African highlife and Brazilian strands to create a strong finger-picking guitar style.

By the mid-1960s he was working as a headlining soloist and recording artist, playing with the duo of Colin Wilkie and Shirley Hart (with whom he recorded the co-credited Folk ’66 album) or accompanying that duo and Alex Campbell on Sing Folk (1965).

Pearse’s international reputation was confirmed and reinforced by his booking at West Germany’s most important folk festival each year between 1965-1968; and his consequent presence on the 10-CD commemorative boxed set, Die Burg Waldeck Festivals 1964-1969 (2008), released by the Bear Family label.

Pearse’s range of publications expanded to include — and this is a selective list — tutors for balalaika and dulcimer, guitar guides for blues and ragtime and The Penguin Folk Guitar Manual (1979).

His books were published in Britain, the US and Germany. In 1974 the German weekly magazine Stern hailed his “special relationship” with Germany, crowning him “the nation’s guitar teacher” while fetchingly commenting on his “English accent on German television”.

He was often ahead of the game. Like the Scottish duo of Alex and Rory McEwen before him, he championed the bouzouki — one Waldeck recording from 1965 accompanying Wilkie confirms this — before it entered the folk imagination through Johnny Moynihan and Anne Briggs, principally at the time of Briggs’s eponymous 1971 album. He similarly championed the dulcimer with The Dulcimer Book (1970); footage of him with the British folk-rock band Steeleye Span makes this connection.

In 1965 he went into the business of designing and developing strings, and began marketing them with the London-based firm British Music Strings. They and Thomastik marketed them under the John Pearse brand name. Building on this commercial success, he moved to the US in 1978 to work for the illustrious Martin Guitars company and with Breezy Ridge Instruments. He expanded and diversified into accessories such as plectrums for guitar and the sarod.

The musicians who used his strings reflected the esteem in which they were held. The folk-blues maestro Wizz Jones, Bill Kirchen (Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen) and Robert Fripp (King Crimson) used his guitar strings; Emily Robison (Dixie Chicks) his banjo strings; Cindy Cashdollar his Dobro and steel guitar strings; and Tim Kliphuis his violin strings. Ironically, some people believed he was a brand name, not a real person.

In 1983 he suffered what has been called “a cataclysmic medical accident” that left him wheelchair-bound, though he continued to gig as a sideline. He blogged about disability issues, especially about disability access at trade fairs and in hotels.

A wine lover, he wrote another television tie-in book — Cooking With Wine (1987). It was wine that drew him to Swabia’s Weingebiet (wine region) where he settled in around 2002. “I have always had a soft spot for the red wines of southern Germany,” he wrote, “so I arranged a vacation there so Linda and I could look for a suitable house. We found Besigheim completely by accident.” It was where he died, having battled tenaciously against disability for decades.

He is survived by his third wife, Linda, and his stepson.

John Melville Pearse, musician, author and inventor, was born on September 12, 1939. He died on October 31, 2008, aged 69