Product Description

This volume is the most extensive, thorough and exhaustive compendium of exercises for the guitar ever published. Adam Kadmon has placed the entire foundation of dexterity and physical technique in this one book. This tome is the essential collection of new and proven exercises that build strength, endurance, control and timing as assembled and created by the author of the renowned Guitar Grimoire Series.

Contains the following:

pattern exercises, three note coil exercises, four note coil exercises Major scale exercises, Minor pentatonic exercises, Chord run exercises

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #196890 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 248 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780825835650
• Condition: USED - GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Customer Reviews

Not worth the money, esp. with so many better books on the market
Do guitar players really think that it's worth 20-30 bucks to have this guy show them the same pattern or idea printed over and over again in every single key? Or do they think it's just cool to have a thick book with nice fonts and cool looking little charts (even though they're totally redundant)? I don't get why these books are so popular. They're short on ideas and long on wasting paper. If you want a good pattern book, there are literally dozens and dozens of better ones on the market that will actually teach you not only patterns but how to apply them, how to use them to make music, etc. Check out Yusef Lateef's Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns, Jerry Bergonzi's books, Ted Greene's Single Note Soloing volumes, Howard Roberts' Guitar Compendium series, Jerry Coker's book Patterns for Jazz (he's actually written a bunch of other good ones too), Don Mock's Guitar Secrets Revealed books, Zucker's Sheets of Sound for Guitar, etc. etc.

Kadmon seems like he's trying to hide the real concept and expects you to look on page 174 to learn the F# version of the same pattern you learned in A, instead of telling you to just move your hands down a minor third -- which makes sense since he sells more books when insecure guitar players think they need to be shown everything over and over again. He gets richer, guitar students get frustrated and overwhelmed (and poor). Do yourself a favor and spend your 30 bucks on a better book than this.

Intense.
This has got to be one of the highest regarded books in my collection, and certainly my favorite of the Guitar Grimoire series.

On it's outer shell, it may seem like another book about chromatic scales and coil exercises, but if you actually take a minute to sit down and DO the exercises you begin to see how well they are formulated.

Kadmon wrote nearly every exercise in F major, so that when played down by the nut, it gives room for a full scale mode, and lets the fingers stretch to the maximum point on the fretboard. He then goes into 3 note coils and 4 note coils, and later covers chord exercises and chromatic runs. Sound boring? Listen closer. After reading the book you may say "I could have come up with those exercises if I really just sat down and thought about it," but that's just it--50-60% of all people that start to play and learn the guitar quit after a certain point because "it hurts" or "they're just not getting better" or "they're not in a band because they're not good." Well this book could transform an average person into a guitarist--and not just someone that plays guitar...a real GUITARIST.

Plus, the entire book is notated for staff! What a bonus. Grade A, Kadmon...Grade A.

-Dr. Kenneth

Great exercises
First of all, like all of the Grimoire series books this one is pedantically thorough. It weighs in at about 248 pages, but the material could probably be covered in a quarter of that. Still, even at the smaller size it would be well worth the price.

The first section presents major scale exercises in F. The reason F Maj. was chosen is that it puts the root of the first movable position on the first fret of the sixth string. At the end of the section diagrams are given for the other roots, but these could be easily derived by moving the forms.

The exercises in this first section have you practice the F Maj. scale three notes per string with economy picking up and down the neck. The advantage of this approach is that if you repeat the exercises the way he describes them (including the picking) you will be playing the major scale very quickly and precisely in no time.

There are some one or two string exercises, coil exercises in three and four note coils, and "scale tone" exercises where you play Maj/min 3rds instead of playing every note. Box positions are never covered, which was interesting to me, because that is how I initially learned.

Section two treats the F min. pentatonic the same way. Again, F because it is the first note on the fretboard for a movable position (Just like you might teach someone a bar chord in F and then say, "Hey you can move it wherever.") The exercises in this section are entirely similar to the first section except that the picking pattern is different because there are only two notes per string (per pattern). The "blues" scale variant is never mentioned.

The third section presents arpeggios of most chords in various keys. The author calls these "chord runs". Notably, he never gets to inversions, but once again he has you practicing patterns in a way that is likely to make them stick in your "muscle memory" (Which is what an "exercise book" should do, I think.)

The final section presents "chromatic exercises" which are the same "dexterity" or "speed" exercises you find in a lot of other books. They are perfectly good exercises, but their presentation here isn't especially notable. They do a good job of pushing us past the 200 page mark ;-)

All in all, it is worth the asking price, and if you learn the exercises and repeat them a lot you may actually get something out of it.

(edit 2009-01-23) In reading the rest of the reviews I notice that there are a lot of negative comments about the exercises being presented in F. All of the positions are movable, so this is a silly reason to disregard this book. Also, if you grab a copy of "Scales and Modes" all of the exercises in the first two sections of "Exercises" can easily be translated to any of the other scales. I have begun to do exactly that, and have been impressed by the speed at which the scales take to my fingers when practiced this way.