What materials are you using for practice?

I am studying/working from the following:

Tomo Fujita's Accelerate Your Guitar Playing DVD

Doug Doppler's Diatonic Theory and Harmony DVD

Fretboard Logic

Barrett Tagliarino's Guitar Fretboard Workbook

Rikki Rooksby's How to Write Songs on Guitar

I am also preparing to start working through the David Lucas Burge Relative Pitch Ear Training Course. I am going to listen to the cd's while I drive my car.

I'd be interested in your thoughts/results with both the Doppler DVD, and the Relative Pitch course. I've heard good things about both of those.

As far as what I'm working with, there's two main books right now. "The Guitar Cookbook" is a good all-around reference that I keep handy. Also, I've been working with the Carl Verheyen Book/CD "Improvising Without Scales".

With the Verheyen book, I've learned maybe 3 or 4 of his lines in about a year. But, I have gotten quite a lot from his concepts, and recommendations! I will eventually go through the entire book. But so far, I've been getting too many ideas from just reading through it. It has really spurred me on to coming up with some fresh lines.

I recommend this book/CD to any player who has a good handle on Diatonic theory and wants to move to something new.

I think the Doppler DVD is very good. He is a good teacher and explains clearly. The pdf that comes with the DVD is very good. It is much better than the ridiculously small pamphlet that comes with Tomo's DVD.

Tomo's DVD is great but I wish they had pdf's with it instead of a little booklet that needs to be able to fit inside the dvd case.

I don't care much for Doppler's playing (Vai, Satriani oriented.) but that seems pretty much irrelevant to the material. I am learning a great deal from it.

Here is a link to Doppler's site and a review of the DVD from Guitar Player.

http://www.guitar411.com/reviews.html

I haven't yet received the relative pitch cd's. Just got them and the perfect pitch cd's on e-bay. I hope to have them by the end of the week. I have heard good things as well so I am excited. It should give me alot of work to do while I am driving!

I'm also finding Wayne Krantz's Improviser's OS to be quite interesting though it is hardly a method that one would work through.

He is trying to get people to think outside of scales and patterns and to discover unexpected or "outside" harmonic relationships.


http://www.waynekrantz.com/index_new.html

http://www.waynekrantz.com/newWebsite/IOSreviews.html

This is how Krantz describes it.

"An Improviser's OS" (2005)
Wayne Krantz



What is this book?

It could be:

"A discipline; a long-term method of mastering the guitar"

However:

'a discipline' implies something ritualistic; uncreative

'long-term' implies that nothing can be accomplished in the short-term. For something to inspire it needs to give some degree of consistent gratification from the start

'method' implies a closed system: dead, sterile

'mastering' implies finality. There is no end to the development of a musician with an active imagination

'the guitar' glorifies an object. The instrument itself is of passing importance. What we do with it is the thing of meaning

music is a thing of meaning

This book is an improviser's Operating System

Its basic premise is that pattern playing can ultimately limit the growth of one's skills as a creative improviser

Since most of us rely heavily on patterns to find notes, alternative means of finding notes must be used to overcome our pattern dependency...


"An Improviser's OS" is now available, only on waynekrantz.com, for $25 including shipping worldwide.

Well, that sounds pretty cool. Has it led you to any cool discoveries, yet? I'd be interested in your findings.

I got a load of new instructional material. Here they are in order of accessibility and usefulness at my current level.

A guide to blues rock soloing by David Grissom
The Doug Seven country guitar licks 1&2 DVD's
Artful arpeggios by don mock
Melodic minor revealed by Don mock
Target Tones By Don Mock
Chord Khancepts by Steve Khan

The Grissom book is a nice mix of novice to intermediate level licks and concepts. What makes it fresh is his amazing blend of blues, Keith richards type riffing and country licks. Super tasty twang rock I can start incorporating immediately.

The Doug Seven stuff is a bit disappointing in that its strictly a "lick" learning session. I was expecting a little more along the lines of how country cats play through changes like Mr. Seven does in his intro solo. I mean its still worthwhile because I have almost no country chops, but my ultimate goal is to play over I-IV-V changes at any tempo whether blues or country. There don't seem to be many non jazz books that cover this sort of thing and the jazz books very quickly deteriorate into chord progressions, scales and substitutions that are over my head.

(I would love to see a comprehensive "play through blues changes with country fried finesse and jazz sophistication without straying too far from the blues" book. Maybe a little gospel/soul follow up.)

Speaking of Jazz Don Mock is one of its finest tutors and Artful Arpeggios and Melodic minor revealed are fantastic little booklets that contain an amazing amount of useful and well laid out material. I will be working on these for a long time altho the Arpeggio booklet is more accessible right now.

Target tones is also useful but I have my hands full already and this one will have to wait. Basically it involves the use of chromatic neighbor tones to approach chord or scale tones. He starts of with 2 basic 4 note chromatic approaches to a given chord tone and then applies them to arpeggios and scales eventually varying the phrasing from straight 8th's to more varied rhythms.

Chord Khancepts is over my head and basically deals with using triads and triad substitution on the top 4 strings to play interesting harmonies in the context of a jazz ensemble where fuller chords would get in the way of bass and piano. Its not immediately useful to me but I hope that changes in the future.

I've got alot of work to do.

Hey Fender_bender,
Stick with the Khan book it's really cool once you get into it - totally worth sticking with. Start with the blues stuff on page 16, example 12 - "suspended sounds, contemporary blues comping". You can apply his concept to just about any modern style blues. The example on the next page, "G-blues shuffle" (ex. 13), is the one that sealed it for me as to how cool that book is. Other good bits to get into are the major/minor exercises - examples 60 and 61 (pg. 50 and 51).

That Don Mock mel.min. book is awesome too. A great collection of really hip ii-V ideas.

Enjoy! - KL

Its funny, the section on blues and R&B is primarily what sold me on the book but it just looks like he's using garden variety triads in unusual ways. More work to do

Well I'm no fun. My most recent purchase is Jazz Theory by Mark Levine. Fantastic book, highly recommended. I seem to be thanking klasine quite often for his suggestions these days, and this one is no exception. The text cites examples from classic recordings to illustrate the concepts, so it's a perfect theoretical companion for the guy that enjoys transcribing from records. I've mostly been utilizing it as a teaching aid with guys that are into blues and jazz, but it will no doubt be a source that I'll call upon for years to come, for my own playing.

I don't intend to neglect the guitar in '07, but my big intensive push is to take the mandolin playing to the next level. I've had more free time than usual lately, and I've devoted most of this to the mando. I've been working through bluegrass standards such as "Cripple Creek" and "Arkansas Traveller", and the book that I've been using is Teach Yourself Bluegrass Mandolin by Andy Statman. I've ordered and am awaiting arrival of the first two books from the National Guitar Workshop complete mandolin series (as recommended by jimfog - thanks, Jim).

I was fortunate enough to attend some of Don Mock's classes years ago, and somewhere around here I have an early REH book and cassette by Don, which is likely out of print. I immersed myself in that book for a while. Don is one of the first guys that turned my head around about outside tonalities and intervallic possibilities, so I'm eternally grateful. The melodic minor scale is a pet sound of mine, so I'd really like to check out Melodic Minor Revealed.

quote:

(I would love to see a comprehensive "play through blues changes with country fried finesse and jazz sophistication without straying too far from the blues" book. Maybe a little gospel/soul follow up.)

Sign me up for that one as well. Maybe we need to write one. If I ever do write a music book, exactly what you've described is what I'd target. No immediate plans to do so, just thinking out loud.

quote:

Originally posted by Corleone:
Well I'm no fun. My most recent purchase is Jazz Theory by Mark Levine. Fantastic book, highly recommended. I seem to be thanking klasine quite often for his suggestions these days, and this one is no exception. The text cites examples from classic recordings to illustrate the concepts, so it's a perfect theoretical companion for the guy that enjoys transcribing from records. I've mostly been utilizing it as a teaching aid with guys that are into blues and jazz, but it will no doubt be a source that I'll call upon for years to come, for my own playing.

I don't intend to neglect the guitar in '07, but my big intensive push is to take the mandolin playing to the next level. I've had more free time than usual lately, and I've devoted most of this to the mando. I've been working through bluegrass standards such as "Cripple Creek" and "Arkansas Traveller", and the book that I've been using is Teach Yourself Bluegrass Mandolin by Andy Statman. I've ordered and am awaiting arrival of the first two books from the National Guitar Workshop complete mandolin series (as recommended by jimfog - thanks, Jim).

I was fortunate enough to attend some of Don Mock's classes years ago, and somewhere around here I have an early REH book and cassette by Don, which is likely out of print. I immersed myself in that book for a while. Don is one of the first guys that turned my head around about outside tonalities and intervallic possibilities, so I'm eternally grateful. The melodic minor scale is a pet sound of mine, so I'd really like to check out Melodic Minor Revealed.

quote:

(I would love to see a comprehensive "play through blues changes with country fried finesse and jazz sophistication without straying too far from the blues" book. Maybe a little gospel/soul follow up.)

Sign me up for that one as well. Maybe we need to write one. If I ever do write a music book, exactly what you've described is what I'd target. No immediate plans to do so, just thinking out loud.

You should check out the Video clip I posted in the Hot Players section under RailRoad Earth, they have a great Mandolin player who trades solos with the fiddle player its a way cool jam.
Really turned me on to mandolin players,love it when I get the chance to see a good one.

quote:

Originally posted by Superbeast520:
You should check out the Video clip I posted in the Hot Players section under RailRoad Earth, they have a great Mandolin player who trades solos with the fiddle player its a way cool jam.
Really turned me on to mandolin players,love it when I get the chance to see a good one.

I did, and really enjoyed it, thanks! Yep, that's the sort of mandolin playing that I aspire to. At the moment, I'm attempting to transition between the status of being an "apprentice hack" to that of being an "intermediate hack" - slow go, but it's getting there. As for the types of tunes that I'm being called upon to play on mando for live and sessions, there's a few up-tempo things, but the bulk of material thusfar has (thankfully) been ballads. Hence, I've been soaking up the moodier Appalacian sounds and Celtic drone open string stuff, but I'm plugging away daily at the bluegrass staples. In any event, I'm slowly but surely falling in love with the instrument.