Customer Reviews

Advanced Guitar Soloing: The Professional Guide to Improvisation (Essential Concepts)

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This is more like a book of improvisation tips ... and while the tips are good to call this material "a professional guide" is one hell of an overstatement, for instance, the melodic minor chapter is only FIVE PAGES LONG ! five pages !!! seriously give me a break, the order in which topics are presented is very sketchy in my opinion, there are some nice licks here but there are no explanations, concepts like superimposition, phrasing, and motivic development are not explained here, even though from listening to the tracks is clearly evident that both authors know and apply those concepts in the lines they played, someone who is not aware of those concepts would think they just pulled the lines out of a hat, so while not completely worthless in my opinion there are much better books on the subject, even though I tried to like it I couln't help feeling this book is a very incomplete one, I did like the dominant chapter and the solos at the end are nice, clearly both authors are very competent players but I would urge them to revise this work in order to improve it for future editions.

I think this book is for advanced guitarists looking to extend their command over more difficult musical progressions/situations. This book is all about choosing the right scale to use in more challenging situations (model interchange, minor songs with a Dominant V chord, altered chords, etc.). Don't expect to learn techniques or new licks; this book is all about theory and developing a best practices approach to determine what scales to play in various musical situations. A good deal of the book is devoted to identifying progressions and then determining the correct scale to apply to them. Both chord center (applying a scale to a group of chords) chord scale approach (a different scale for each chord in the progression) are presented. I found the book very useful in resolving these musical issues and challenges for me. I thought that more effort could have been put into the CD recording, but this was a minor flaw.