Guitar Fretboard Workbook

This book is nothing short of amazing!!!I have been playing guitar for 20 years this month, and never took the time to learn much of the theory as it was always too much to memorize...Firstly, I recommend this book to the novice who just wants to learn a few songs just to impress some ladies - on up to the professional guitarists making a living on their 6 stringed' friend.Beginners: Don't be threatened. The first chapter is designed to get you familiar with the guitar. This book promises to make accomplished guitarists out of people first learning guitar within a year, and I believe with the discipline ANYONE can do it.Intermediate: This may be your next step to becoming one of the greats. This would have set me way above the rest of the students in all school and garage bands at my age.Advanced: (I consider myself to be between this and the next) It's not too late! You will make light work of this and jump leaps and bounds from where you left off. It will probably be most exciting for you.Professionals: You will already know a lot of this. This will help you fly through the book. By showing you shortcuts, you can access more notes, faster than you're able to drudge up from memorized scales and repetitive riffs. And of course one of the great things about being a good guitarist is being able to teach right!?This can be the ultimate workbook for your students. They will, (with your help) learn quickly too, and you may be able to expand your "skill range" of students you're able to teach. And your reputation will reflect. If you're anything like me, I can always use help with being more creative soloing and this book does that for me too.This book has ways, only for the guitar, to get around a lot of the boring parts of theory that you have to memorize. For example, instead of learning what note every fret is on the board one by one (which is important if you want to play professionally), this workbook shows you five simple patterns to memorize. You build on these patterns in each chapter until you can play any mode of any scale from anywhere on your guitar! You will automatically become familiar with the names and be able to figure out what every note is if you haven't yet memorized that the 2nd string 11th fret is a B flat.You'll learn everything you need to know about the fret board just by having fun with these root shapes and patterns.I learned to play by ear and over the first few years, I had been forced to memorize some of these root shapes, so I already knew somewhat of the importance of these patterns. I can and have jammed with some great musicians over the years, but one thing I felt I couldn't do very well was solo, unless I was familiar with the key and had memorized riffs I could slip into variations of the melody to sound good, and even then, I'll still hit an accidental and sound just as good as my one year old! I never took the time to memorize but a handful of scales; never enough to improvise or be creative with my solos.By getting familiar with these patterns and learning how they connect to each other and can be played everywhere, I found they would be the foundation to every chord, arpeggio, and scale that I did know and ever wanted to know!!You won't regret this creative way of looking at the relationships between the scales and arpeggios, and in a light funny way of presenting it to you. The book uses hands on, verbal exercises, and plenty of diagrams to show and explain to every kind of learner what exactly is happening in each chapter. Highly recommend!!!!Rob - Dadgigsopics

I can't speak highly enough of this workbook. Within 3 months of working with this book a little bit every day and practicing the concepts suggested, I was able to triple my working chord vocabulary up and down the neck at all fret positions, and without having to memorize a thousand new shapes. If you work meticulously through this book from beginning to end in small doses, your knowledge of the fretboard layout will expand significantly. This book teaches you WHERE THINGS ARE AND WHY THEY'RE THERE so that you can then take that knowledge and apply it to the things you're learning from a teacher or by yourself from a method book or youtube videos. This is a supplementary learn resource, NOT a guitar method book. It will NOT teach you how to solo, specific playing techniques, or how to play a certain style of music; that is not the purpose of this book and if that is what you seek then you should either find a guitar teacher or one of the many self-taught venues like online self-pace courses or a good guitar method book. that includes audio and video. What this book WILL do is help you expand your chord vocabulary and scale patterns so that you can break out of always playing chords at the first three frets because you don't know how else to play them. Been learning some soloing but you're stuck always soloing a pentatonic scale at the same fret position because you don't know where else to play something? This book will show you how to figure out where on the fretboard you can experiment with solo in the key you're playing in, and how to figure out the scale pattern you should be using in order to play at that location of the neck, and WHY you're now switching to this pattern instead of using a different pattern. Etc. It's a great book. As with anything else you'll only get out of it what you put in.

This book was bought early, as I will be doing more scale work after I complete the current project. I got the book on Friday and was immediately sucked in. By Sunday I was able to find a note on the fretboard in seconds AND identify any note on the fretboard in Seconds. Prior to this weekend the area above fret 5 on strings 1 through 4 took me almost 30 seconds per note. Also note I had gone through almost 20 blank fretboard printouts in one weekend. I have set aside my other project for the last two weeks of this year to make sure I do the exercises in chapters 2-5 daily to ingrain this wonderful stuff in long term memory. I will also be writing things and say things out of my other methods as well. I also plan on returning to this method once my current project is complete (a bit earlier than originally planned).As with all methods I get, I read ahead. Chapters 1, 3 and 6 are review for me. Even though it was not an issue for me (already knew major scale patterns), I can see the issue with Chapter 7. There is a jump from major scale pattern on one string to full the major scale patterns across the strings. Unfortunately, this jump is common to most methods. The missing step is how to turn the major scale on one string into the 5 common major scale fragments (in order from lowest to highest string VII-I-II, III-IV-V, VI-VI-I, II-III-IV V-VI and back to VII-I-II) and then how to reassemble them (in the order given) to create the 5 scale patterns (same fragment used on strings 1 and 6). By learning fragments first, learning all scales becomes easier to understand and you will learn them faster.I won't be able to tell you about chapters 8 and beyond until sometime next year. For chapters 1-5 alone BUY THIS BOOK and you get the free bonus of all the other chapters! I also bought this book (and 100 blank fretboard diagram pages) for my brother who also plays guitar.With this book I highly recommend you find a good blank fretboard diagram page (with multiple diagrams per page) and print out 100 copies. Use these instead of writing in book, that way you can do the exercises multiple times daily until you are ready to move on.