I was contacted recently by a guitarist called Jian who wanted to bring to my attention their guitar teacher and in particular this teacher’s guitar method book that she wrote. I was intrigued and was put in contact with Susan Palmer, a guitar instructor at Seattle University. Susan is very passionate about teaching guitar which led her to create ‘The Guitar Lesson Companion’. This method book was created to help students get more out of their lessons and provide a structured framework that provides teachers with an outline to expand upon and exercises that students can work through on their own.

First of all the book is ring bound which instantly makes it very usable, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to play from a book that keeps closing, this book will sit on your music stand, table, lap whatever and stay open at the page you want. This is usually overlooked by publishers or maybe it is more expensive to produce books this way? The book starts with the basics of playing guitar and reminded me of the Fred Noad classical guitar book that my teacher used when I was starting my classical guitar studies. To begin with there are some warm up exercises which a beginner will probably have trouble with but it is something that they can continually reference and use and it makes sense to be at the start of the book. Next up Susan dives into musical notation in relation to open strings. If you have ever wanted to learn how to read music, even if you can already play guitar, it is essential that take it slowly and learn to recognise each note on the stave in relation to the fretboard. Susan’s studies give you the opportunity to step through the reading exercises filling in the blanks so that you are reading the music, rather than just looking at it.

So Susan’s idea is you start out slowly, using a few notes on the top E string to progress through basic Rhythmic exercises. Each exercise is available on the included CD to help you to follow the rhythmic examples to start out. After a few pages of studies Susan moves on to the B string and so on slowly building in rhythmic complexity and expanding your fretboard knowledge and reading abilities until you are reading music that covers all 6 strings in the first position (first 3 frets and open strings). This is a great stepping stone for learning to read music across the entire fretboard and is the first thing you learn as a classical guitarist. The next section of the book moves on to scales and theory with plenty of exercises to help you learn. Susan has written studies to take you through the Major keys starting with G Major and then through the cycle of fifths each using all 6 strings to play the scale, a scale pattern and then arpeggiating the major scale to finish.

The next section of the book focuses on chords, using diagrams and TAB for chord changing exercises and jams. Each chord sequence either has a melody using the Major/Minor and Pentatonic scales that you have already learned or a set of scale diagrams that you can use to improvise over the changes. There are diagrams showing the Major and Pentatonic Minor scales in all 5 “box” positions and exercises to complete to make sure you know the actually notes as well as the scale degrees. There is also a section on the CAGED system of movable chord shapes to help you open up even more possibilities over the fretboard.

All in all it is a very thorough book, so who is this book for? Well it is definitely aimed at guitar teachers and students who are beginner to intermediate level or perhaps the more advanced player who simply wants to learn to read standard musical notation rather than just TAB. I can see how teachers would benefit from having this teaching framework to aid their own teaching syllabus and it gives students the opportunity to complete exercises on their own and work with the CD between lessons. Every aspect of learning guitar is covered in a systematic but simplified manner. What I’m saying is, don’t expect to learn entire songs or instrumental pieces however you will have the chord and scale vocabulary to learn your favourite songs if you follow Susan’s method, practice and don’t try to rush through it (easy to say I know!).

If you would like to order ‘The Guitar Lesson Companion’ head over to Lead Cat Press.

Whenever somebody on a guitar forum asks which book they should buy for improving speed or lead guitar techniques there are a couple of books that always come up, Troy Stetina’s Fretboard Mastery and Speed Mechanics for Lead Guitar. Now “Speed Mechanics”, as you can probably tell from the design, has been around a long time. It has a copyright dating back to 1990 and is considered the “Shredder’s Bible”. I thought I would check out what all the fuss is about as I seemed to miss this book when I was learning. I will give you a quick overview of both books as there is far too much material in each book to cover in one post. Then after I have absorbed some of the information and applied the practices to my own playing I will publish another post in the future to outline how I have benefit from the books.

Speed Mechanics For Lead Guitar
Speed Mechanics is divided into 3 parts: Mechanical ability, Rhythmic ability and Creativity. Mechanical ability is the where the real guts of this book lie Troy not only teaches you strength building exercises but teaches you how to practice efficiently something which is often overlooked, I know I was far too impatient when I started learning and this hindered my progression. This section then moves on to building speed through cyclic and sequenced patterns using alternate picking before moving on to sweep picking and arpeggios. There is also a full transcription of Troy’s version of “Flight of the bumblebee” by Rimsky Korsakov to practice all the alternate picking techniques you have learned.

Rhythmic ability has some basic information on time signatures, offbeats using triplets and plenty of rhythmic sequences which all build to learning a Paganini Caprice at the end of the section.

Creativity talks about intervals and their connection between certain sounds and how they are represented on the fretboard. It then has some interval recognition training in order to help you create solos that you hear in your head without having to rely on old patterns.

There is a lot to get through but I am currently trying to re-learn with a completely revamped picking technique so I know this book is going to help me get my picking up to scratch, as I said before I will post at a later date as to how much improvement I see.

Fretboard Mastery
Fretboard Mastery was released last year and is the long awaited sequel to Speed Mechanics. This is Troy’s full system for learning the fretboard inside out and there is enough material in this book to write a complete university syllabus! When I was studying for my music degree back I felt that a lot of the information lacked relevance to me personally and therefore became harder to comprehend and absorb. What this book looks to have achieved is to take all the interval ear training and theory and apply to it the guitar in a way that is interesting and comprehendible. There is way too much in the book for me to talk about in this post but it starts with Foundation for Music which covers basic music theory, how scales and arpeggios are constructed and how they are related to triads. It then moves on to how scales/modes are positioned on the fretboard, more advanced music theory, chord structures and chord progression ear training. Troy then moves on to expanding your fretboard knowledge showing how scale and arpeggio positions overlap and exercises to help you memorise the box positions.

This book is not only a complete guitar method it is also a complete guitar reference, something that you can keep coming back to in order to further your musical knowledge and sharpen your skills. If I was to start teaching someone guitar today these would be the 2 books that I could use as a complete method, from theory to shredding. One of the most important things to realise as a guitarist is that you never stop learning, Fretboard Mastery is a tool that can help your musical progression whether you’re into rock, jazz, anything! There is something in this book to help everyone.

You can buy both of these books online at Music44.com which I find is the cheapest site for instructional books and DVD’s, links are below:
Speed Mechanics
Fretboard Mastery

Don’t forget you can also get one on one video instruction from Troy Stetina at GuitarInstuctor.com.

Well just when you thought you had decided which Video Lesson site to invest your hard earned cash comes along a new player and this one is a little different. In order to really illustrate what is going on in the photo to the left you need to go and watch the video on the homepage of iPerform 3D’s site. Done that? Ok so what they have created is an instructional tool that blends motion capture technology usually reserved for games with 3D graphics for a very unique learning experience.

”We’ve applied the same [motion capture] technology to capture the detailed technique of top touring and studio guitarists, turning them into animated instructors as skilled as the pros.”

Because you are viewing a 3D representation of the guitar player you are able to do things you cannot do with a video, you can zoom in and out and rotate the camera around every part of the guitar to watch the players right and left hand technique in detail, you can even go behind the fretboard and see through the neck to watch the finger positioning. You can also slow down the action and the sound to any speed while maintaining pitch, albeit a timestretched version which is going to degrade in quality depending on how slow you want it! You can also set various sections to loop to help you learn a riff, which I think is a pretty cool feature. Another cool feature is Tab on demand which pops up on top of the playback.

The big question, is this better than an instructional video? Well yes and no. The finger representation is good but not perfect so you lose a little of the subtlety but its pretty close. I think you need to download the trial and make sure before you fork out $19.95 a month or $99.95 a year but I think this looks like quite a promising piece of software. The only drawback is that it is PC only, luckily for me I own Parallels and therefore can try it out in a virtual PC but I doubt it will run as well as the native OS.

Only a few days ago I posted about iVideoSongs, a new service where you can pay for video guitar lessons by pro guitarists. This service was more about the guitarists teaching you one of their particular songs, this is where GuitarInstructor.com differs. Yes it is yes another video guitar lesson site but GuitarInstructor.com goes down the more traditional instructional video path. For instance you can learn “Lead Guitar” from Eric Johnson, learn about effects pedals with Joe Bonamassa or how to play fast with Troy Stetina.

Pricing is pretty good, the speed building lesson by Troy Stetina for instance is a 7 minute lesson that costs $1.99, compare that to a video download on iTunes and you’re getting pretty good value for money! But that’s not all, they also have TAB’s available for download at $0.99 each! Eruption is currently the number 1 download by the way, so if you haven’t already learned it now is your chance! Aside from the lessons and TAB’s there are also song learning videos similar to iVideoSongs taught by Doug Boduch.

Although there doesn’t appear to be any affiliation with a Guitar magazine, I have seen the Bonamassa video before and I think it was on a cover CD from a magazine? Anyone know if this is the case?

Thanks to guitarflame.com for the heads up on GuitarInstructor.com

I know that is a big call comparing a site to iTunes but after watching the demo video it seems they have taken the same kind of approach to their site model. www.ivideosongs.com is currently in beta but already seems like a very strong entry into the online teaching genre. The first thing I did was look to see what was in the Folk Acoustic category and was suprised to see that there are a couple of lessons by Erik Mongrain! That impressed me a lot, then I headed over to the Electric rock section and found a tutorial by Alex Lifeson of Rush!

Now don’t expect all the tutorials to be by the original artist that isn’t really the point, but what they do seem to have done is to put together some great high definition video tutorials from very capable teachers. The only thing I would say is that it is a little pricey, for instance just to learn Jet’s “Are you gonna be my girl” will set you back $4.99. There are, however, some tutorials that are free to download at beginner and intermediate levels which I’m sure they will expand on.

Also worth a mention is a similar service called nowplayit.com which also offers tutorials by artists (although at $8 per video they are a little bit more expensive) but you can also get a Lite version and an in-house version. ‘In House’ tutorials are exactly the same format at the ‘Full’ tutorials, but instead of featuring the actual artist who wrote or performs the song, it features our own in house tutor. The Lite version is a bit weird, it is like the Full version except the artist is removed… so really you just get a music video with tab overlaid? hmm…

The interface for iVideosongs is far superior to nowplayit.com which is primarily based around a search rather than categorised content.