Product Description

An in-depth approach to mastering arpeggios for guitarists, beginning with simple arpeggio studies, this book progresses through simple concepts and tunes then proceeds to tackle some of the great standards that jazz musicians play. The lesson concludes with advanced arpeggio concepts including super-imposition of unusual arpeggios over various chord types to create startling tonal clusters. This is a must-have for all serious guitarists who want to achieve great technique while developing their sense of harmony. Companion CD included.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #144034 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01
• Released on: 2004-01-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 40 pages

About the Author
Born in New York City, Mimi Fox began playing drums at nine, and the guitar at ten. Inspired by the wide variety of music enjoyed by her family and her own youthful penchant for pop, folk, and R&B, she bought her first jazz album at fourteen "because it was on sale." That album, John Coltrane's classic Giant Steps, changed the course of her musical life. Fox began touring immediately after high school and moved to San Francisco in 1979 where she became a sought-after musician. She is on the faculty of the Jazzschool in Berkeley, California, and has appeared as guest clinician at the University of Connecticut, University of Oregon, the Britt Music Festival (in Jacksonville, Oregon), and other distinguished institutions. She has also received numerous awards for her original scores for dance, theater and film. Most Recently, she was named "Rising Star" in the Downbeat critics poll for 2003.

Mimi maintains a whirlwind tour schedule, performing in major jazz clubs and festivals from New York to Tokyo. She has performed with fellow guitarists Charlie Byrd, and Charlie Hunter, as well as with the Turtle Island String Quartet and has shared the stage with a wide array of artists; she has also been featured on a number of television shows including BET on Jazz.

Her most recent recording, Two for the Road (Origin Records) features Greta Matassa while Standards (Origin Records) is a solo guitar effort. Kicks, her second CD on the Monarch label, showcases her extraordinary soloing and features special guests Joey DeFrancesco on organ, keyboardist Russell Ferrante and drummer Will Kennedy from the Yellowjackets, vocalist Angela Bofil, and guitarist Charlie Hunter. Turtle Logic (Monarch) with the Turtle Island String Quartet was her first commercial recording.

Equally adept on both steel string acoustic and hollow-body jazz guitars, Mimi Fox is a compelling musician, prolific composer, talented arranger, inspired teacher, and dynamic leader of her own band. She endorses Heritage Guitars.

Customer Reviews

good arpeggio specific study
This book is definitly a great resource on arpeggios and working them into your playing. It focuses on jazz, as the title suggests. First Mimi shows you a couple simple arpeggio examples and shapes, and then a few examples of ways to practice them over progressions. After that she gives you a few reference pages of all the arpeggio shapes you'd need. These reference pages are great. They have the chord inversions imposed on each arpeggio shape so you can easily see how they work together and easily match them up. So it incidently kinda helps you review chord inversions and drop 2 voicings.

After the reference pages, the arpeggio study section starts. The tunes are bases off real standards (summertime, night and day, all the things you are, etc). The arpeggio studies involve playing the proper arpeggio for each chord throughout the whole tune. She gives examples of how she does it and then provides an explaination of what she's doing in each bar and why. For example, she explains some substitutions she likes and such.

The book comes with a CD of Mimi playing each example. It's good to hear the examples played, but really not a necessity. It would have been more helpful if the studies had just the background rhythm/chords so you can practice playing arpeggios over them...rather than it having her arpeggios played over it. I've been entering the chords into Band In A Box and using that as a play-a-long to practice playing arepggios to.

There's an advanced section after the studies that I haven't gotten to yet, but she provides substitution ideas and things she likes to do with arpeggios.

Overall, this book is very helpful and covers the subject matter. I bought this book in the hopes that going through it would help get arpeggios into my playing, and so far by working on these studies it is definitly helping me learn the arpeggios by applying them. This book will probably always stick around for me because of the arpeggio/chord inversion references pages are useful.

Solid techniques for playing over jazz changes
This book is fantastic. If you are like me, you probably learned how to play guitar to pop songs. You learned chords and scales, and took a modal approach to solo instrumentals... then you try to play something progressive, and you realize that you're fairly limited: how do they do that?
This breaks the chain of confusion and gets you oriented to any number of jazz chord changes by learning arpeggios from the chords themselves. You can then "play the changes" for real; not having to hang onto some fixed scale or pattern (which gets boring to the listener). This has pop / rock / blues applications too (e.g. sweep picking uses arpeggios). I highly recommend this book as a kind of Rosetta Stone for the aspiring jazz / advanced improviser. I took a ten week course with Mimi before she wrote this book, and this book truly distills the main learning points that we all found so difficult to comprehend. With the CD, you can practice anytime, and you won't have to test Mimi's patience! I am so glad she wrote this book.

Great arpeggio method
I own a lot of jazz methods and I would rate this one near the top in terms of usefulness. Besides relating the arps to chord types this method gives many examples of how to apply them along with very thorough analysis of application.
I highly recommend this book to those learning how to use arpeggios & chromatics to create interesting solos.