Customer Reviews

10-Minute Acoustic Guitar Workout (Book & CD)

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This book has such great advice for a beginning guitarist. I am new to guitar playing - well, I tried to learn 10 years ago and never got beyond the basic A/C/G chord shapes. Below are some of the gems I've discovered in this book:

1. Deal with fingering difficulties immediately, rather than ignoring them and hoping they'll get better as time goes by.

2. Practice my barre without chord shapes, once the barre is strong, then I can add the shapes. I can't tell you how discouraged I was by barre chords, and I think breaking them down like this would have helped me tremendously 10 years ago.

3. Exactly where my left fingers should be touching the strings - close to the frets, on the tips, not fleshy pads.

4. Break down songs into 4 bar segments, rather than try to plow through the whole thing at once, and be prepared to spend a long time learning a song.

5. How to set up an effective practice routine.

I guess these are pretty basic things a good guitar teacher would have taught me, but I had 3 guitar teachers (briefly, but still) in the late 1980s and still managed to miss these insights.

The book also has lots of information about chord arrangements and scales, and the importance of training your ear to recognize major & minor chords and the intervals that make up the major scale.

But my favorite part is the actual workout, which consists of 5 charts. Each chart has 5 exercises (warm-up, arpeggio, scale, chromatic exercise, harmonized scale) with 12 different levels. I am just a D+ on Chart 1, and I can already see the difference. There is a CD that contains the workouts, played at a slow tempo and a regular tempo.

Actually, I take that back. I think my favorite part about this book is how the author really addresses concerns and thoughts a beginning guitarist (like me!) has. He clearly has a lot of experience teaching, and it really shows.

I'm just not sure why this book is billed as a "fast track" to learning acoustic guitar, unless it is because most other tracks are filled with inefficiencies and bad habits that could hinder a budding guitarist. There is no shortcut to actually practicing your guitar, alot! I don't think you can just do this workout and expect yourself to learn to play guitar - you'll need to work on songs and practice every day. Well anyway, that's a small quibble, I paid full price for this book at my book store and it was well worth it.

I just wanted to add my voice as an enthusiastic thumbs up for this book. I've been playing for 25 years. I own only about 10 woodshed/workbook-type books for guitar, and this is the one that I (1) use everytime I practice, and (2) found has a continuum of easy to darn-near-impossible techniques to work on. Mead writes with the simplicity and to-the-point clarity of a career guitar instructor. Where other books seem either too easy or devoid of stuff I can learn/work on (the books I thumbed through and never bought - heh), of the few I've purchased because they really contained quality stuff, this is the best of my ten. Why? The 10-minute exercises (5 a day, 2 minutes each - in graduating chapters according to difficulty) stretch you in ways you'd never thought of - and work both left-hand, right-hand, scales, rythym ... a complete little growth course. The additional information in the readable chapters is great (some I knew and some I didn't), and the CD's examples are illustrative - burn them to mp3 and use them in your iPod as you play through the book.

This is by far the BEST book I have seen to help learn or improve on the guitar. If you want to get better on guitar buy this book and do what it says.

I felt compelled to write a review even though I just received the book when I saw it was 108 pages of Computer 101 and only 26 pages of the actual workout, 18% of the entire book!!

This book should have been titled Guitar 101 with A Few Exercises.