Product Description

When improvising, what your mind hears is more often than not determined by what your body can reproduce on your instrument. Much of your conception as an improviser is determined by your technique. If you can’t play certain types of ideas, you are simply not going to conceive of them while you are improvising. Even if you could, it wouldn’t matter, since you couldn’t play them anyway. Serious chops building technical studies for single note lines and chords. Plus, the examples feature a lot of harmonic content. This book is about much more than technique...I believe this would be a great addition to any jazz guitarist's library. In standard notation only.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61206 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-03
• Released on: 2004-08-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 111 pages

About the Author
A professional guitarist since age 15, author and publisher Andrew Green has performed in a wide variety of jazz settings. Currently active in the New York jazz scene, Andrew is also an educator at "Jazz In July" at the University of Massachusetts and the "Mile High Jazz Camp" at the university of Colorado.

Excerpted from Jazz Guitar Technique by Andrew Green. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
When improvising, what your mind hears is more often than not determined by what your body can reproduce on your instrument. Much of your conception as an improviser is determined by your technique. If you can’t play certain types of ideas, you are simply not going to conceive of them while you are improvising. Even if you could, it wouldn’t matter, since you couldn’t play them anyway.

There are many melodic structures that are physically challenging to play on the guitar. For example, anything that necessitates playing consecutive notes on adjacent strings presents logistical problems for both hands. This includes various arpeggios, triad-based lines, consecutive fourths, and large interval leaps. Since these melodic devices present such a challenge, the range of ideas in a typical guitar solo doesn’t include them.

To expand the palette of musical ideas available to you as an improviser, you must expand your technique. The way to do this is to practice things that feature physically challenging motion. By playing lines that incorporate new and different types of melodic movement, you gain the technical ability necessary to improvise with these structures, and the sound of these melodies will gradually enter your musical consciousness.

The exercises in this book will improve your technique, increase the range of your ideas, and open up new avenues of improvisation to you. You, in turn will have the opportunity to add to the vocabulary of what is possible to play on the guitar.

Customer Reviews

Remodel Your Playing Technique
This is a wonderful book if you're trying to "remodel" your jazz guitar technique. I entered this book with the goal of 1. Upgrading my music reading ability. 2. Upgrading my Picking Technique. 3. Upgrading my left hand ability. I'm presently up to page 45 and my playing has changed remarkably since I started this book. I work seriously on all the "upgrades" while playing the exercises and continue until the exercise is "under my fingers". While I may not be the world's greatest guitarist (I call myself a Jazz Guitar Student), the use of this book has moved my playing definately "off the charts" from where I started. My tone is much better and I've learned hybrid picking while using the book. Working with the exercises has "opened" my left hand and improved my horizonal fingering. If you're dead serious about improving your playing, this is the book. All my "upgrade" areas have remarkably improved. And to think, this book sat on my bookself - unloved - for 2 years before I got into it. It's also useful to have a cheap keyboard that plays chords & rhythm to give your ear clues about the exercises, some of which have a nice "outside" quality to them. I started this book about 5 months ago 1-5 hours/day. Wonderful Book. No Tabs - Hardcore. Ed/California

The best series out there
Take no shortcuts, study bits and pieces at a time and you will be amazed. Learning to read music opens doors to creativity and helps you understand the language. If you are a person who loves learning, these are the books for you. I'm finding that by studying Andrew Green's Jazz Guitar Series, my overall vocabulary in music is improving. I have all three books in the series and don't have the need to pay for lessons any more.

I'm working through it
This book is just what I wanted and needed. The exercises are interesting and I am fairly painlessly learning to read music. The technical barriers are fewer than they were when I started. I am slowly beginning to think "music" a bit as one learns to speak and think in another language ie at first slowly and haltingly, putting individual bits and pieces together, moving on to the musical phrases of this book ie first sentences.

When I get to the etudes in the back it is my hope that I will move on to the equivalent of musical paragraphs. So far it seems to be working.

I believe that this is an excellent book of exercises which are well tailored those interested in improving their technique, their fund of musical ideas, and the overall smooth transition to thinking in terms of those ideas while also being able to play out those ideas more freely on a guitar