Product Description

A guide to learning the basic tools for becoming a good player and musician. Includes AlÕs own lesson plan system, tunes, blues patterns, jazz chord exercises, playing and practicing tips, and a complete guide to chords, scales and arpeggios.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #140951 in Books
• Published on: 1987-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Customer Reviews

Incredibly dense - Worth the effort.
This book is not for the uninitiated. It certainly is no course for beginning guitarists, as most would find it unfulfilling and incomprehensible. However, if you are a veteran guitarist who wishes to vastly increase his/her chord and scale vocabularies, then this book is perfect. It is really nothing more than a chord dictionary, with two added features. The first is that the chords are arranged in terms of complimenting one another. Thus you learn chord relations, and not just chords. Secondly, the scale section is organized similarly; after learning a series of chord relations, the student then moves on to learn the relevant scales. Once again, it is an incredible book, but not one for someone who just wants to add a few more chops to his/her vocabulary.

Excellent training
I have tried many methods of training. Most fall short on many accounts, some less so. Although this book is terse and strangely organized (you have to flip back and forth constantly to follow the lesson plan) it is well worth doing.

In less than a week I can already feel the difference in my playing. It might be the fact that I am simply following the instructions and not wasting any time during the small amount of time I get to practice, or the combination of chord, scale & arpeggio exercises. Whatever it is, it works.

It has also helped with sight reading. I have gained some confidence in that area by trying to read while playing (although the current tempo tends to make that quite difficult). There are some errors in the music notation, but they are easy to spot and ignore.

My suggestion, above and beyond what the authors suggest, is to play all of the exercises with a metronome. Even the chord groupings. It increases the benefits of the exercises with very little extra effort.

A well thought-out method for jazz guitar.
I recommend this book because it provides a practical, effective way to approach the daunting mass of information that one must assimilate to play jazz guitar. Ten lesson plans are outlined, each covering chords, scales, arpeggios, reading and playing tunes. Each lesson is designed to take roughly two weeks for the diligent student (two hours of practice per day is the suggested minimum). Thus, much of the guesswork has been taken out of planning a practice routine, allowing you to use your time efficiently and progress quickly toward your goals. Unforunately, as tends to be the case with books written by and for guitarists, the writing itself is often egregiously bad and the overall sensibility embarrassingly un-p.c. But stick with it and you can expect great improvement in your musicianship.