Customer Reviews

Guitar Aerobics: A 52-Week, One-lick-per-day Workout Program for Developing, Improving and Maintaining Guitar Technique

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The author spotlights 7 important techniques (alternate picking, arpeggios, sweep picking, string skipping, legato, string bending, and rhythm guitar) one for each day of the week, and builds on each every week. So every Monday is alternate picking day, and builds on the lesson of the Monday before. It's a great idea. The author says that an intermediate player can skip to around week 17 and an advanced player can probably go to week 36. I'd say I'm lower intermediate, after some 10 years of playing both steel-string acoustic and electric. I've worked my way through the first 10 weeks of lessons in 4 or 5 days. I find some of the skills like string bending, arpeggios, legato, and rhythm to be very easy, but I've never done sweep picking and found it to be a challenge. And the string skipping is something I've never done much concentrated work on, so it's great. I'm sure that when I get up to week 17 the other skills will get more challenging for me.

JR has a good point that there's not as much guidance on technique as I'd like on a couple of things. I think he was overly critical though. There are short notes on each day's lesson about technique. One was to keep the fretting pinky in place on the G while you shift from a G to an E chord - it helped me to stop fumbling around for the E shape. Another that I have not mastered, is in sweep arpeggios, to mute each note after you play it by slightly releasing the pressure on the fretting finger. That's one that I would like more details on, because I find it hard to do, especially if I'm barring the 1st and second string with my index finger on say the 3rd fret while catching the 3rd string with my middle finger. Do I roll them off, or do I ease up on all strings between each pick?

Anyhow, I like the breakdown into small bite-size daily chunks that I can spend 10 or 15 minutes on a day, as part of my regular practice.

Under normal circumstances I am not one to take the time to write book reviews. This is going to be short and to the point. Disregard the reviews that do not give this book a high rating. I am a beginner and dearly wish that I had purchased this book before spending hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars on worthless instruction books and lessons from mediocre guitar teachers.

The critics are correct in their statements that the book does not contain thorough instruction on each and every aspect, i.e. holding the pick, building speed, how to hold your mouth, etc., of playing the guitar. But, look at the price of it...... There are pages and pages of free material on the internet regarding the actual mechanics of playing. This book provides exactly what is advertised; useful exercises for "Developing, Improving, and Maintaining Guitar Technique"

If you are fortunate enough to have stumbled across this book before spending countless dollars on other worthless material and instruction, consider yourself blessed and buy this book.

I've only had this book for a short time, but I really like this book and I'm a beginner. Then again I love a good challenge-when I really push myself is when I learn the most- and this is definitely packed full of lessons to keep you busy for more than a year. It's not a method book, so you already need some knowledge of the guitar. But as far as technique books go, this is top notch and well written by a guy who knows guitar (Troy Nelson was the former editor of Guitar One and now I think he's at Guitar Edge). It's a bummer when you pay good money for a book and you are bored with it in a few weeks. I think I'll be proud when I can see how I've grown as a player from the easy licks to the hard ones (when I finally get there!). No I'm not mastering one a day, but everyone has to go at their own pace. I mean, a year's worth (or more) of lessons and music for under $20?! Right on.

Today I finish Week 6 in this book, and I honestly have only good things to say about it. Well--only good things at the end of it all, that is.

* Its day-by-day structure helps easily-distracted players like me keep a schedule. It will quickly become useless if you miss days, skip exercises, or try to use it irregularly. With that in mind, I've been able to stick with it every day, which keeps me playing everyday. Quite the feat. You COULD try to use it as a source for guitar licks, but that's not what this is meant to be and there are better books for that.

* If one's serious about using this as the skeleton to their practice method, as I have, you actually have to develop an advancement system on your own. They don't provide one. You have the daily exercise in notation and tab, a couple short paragraphs on what it's teaching and a quick tip on how to properly play it, or how to get a little more out of it (such as switching up the picking style, etc.), the bpm speed range that the rhythm CD will provide, and a couple other small tidbits of information. Unless you're an extremely gifted player, you're not going to master even the first lick at its top speed of 112 bpm on the first day. You need to keep coming back to it for a while. Also, by the time you get to the first Friday's exercise, there's no way you'll master it the first day--I still goof it up. Plus, rushing through each one to max out the speed is not useful. You need to spend time with each one at slower speeds before cranking up the metronome. Such is basic practice knowledge.
It took me a bit, but I developed a plan of attack that I like. I start each new exercise at the slowest recommended staring speed, so far 40 bpm in every case. Once I've practiced it for a while and feel that I have it down at that speed, I bump the metronome up +10 bpm to 50, and move to yesterday's exercise, which I did yesterday at 40. Once I have that down at 50, I go +10 bpm again to the day before yesterday's exercise, which I did yesterday at 50, and so on, all the way up to 10 bpm past the top recommended speed for the exercise a little over a week ago. On days when I don't have much time, I'll do my best to just quickly learn the new exercise so I can practice it more at 50 bpm the next day. Thankfully I've only needed to do that a couple times. At first I struggled with "putting away" the much older exercises when I get so far from them, but was able to relax when I reminded myself that . . .

* Each day of the week is always the same technique area. Monday is always alternate picking. Tuesday is always string skipping. Saturday is always legato (hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides). Etc. In addition to that, each new week's exercise builds on or expands the previous week's, in most cases. I was actually getting frustrated with it at one point because of that. How many legato sequences can you build out of the same Am pentatonic scale? But then one week, it switched up dramatically enough that it felt new again. This at first seemed to me like lazy writing, but I changed my opinion. It is SO important that it is done this way. It's baby steps. Even advanced players need baby steps with new stuff and with mastering new techniques. Also, this helps my personal practice approach to the book--since, for example, this Thursday's arpeggio exercise is building yet again on the same ideas from the Thursday exercise from 2, 3, 4 weeks ago, I don't need to keep practicing those ones. I'm slowly building the complexity, which means I'm able to fly through the old ones without hindrance. With this slow build, however, keep in mind . . .

* There are a LOT of exercises here. If you stick with this and actually do this over an entire year, it would be impossible for it to not improve your playing. That's not because the book is magical or something, or so amazingly clever, but because to do so means you're practicing regularly and advancing slowly but surely. At the start of my sixth week of this book, I was getting a little frustrated that I'd been at it for seemingly so long but so little progress in regards to the complexity of the exercises had been made. So I took some time to finally put both the rhythm CD and the exercise examples CD onto my iPod for easy access. Well, I had to type out and name all 53 tracks on the example CD, and got reminded about how many exercises there really are. Today I do exercise 42. Of 365. My weeks aren't even in double digits yet.

So in the end, this is a great book if you use it exactly how they suggest. Don't make it your only book or source--be sure to throw in some scale sequences, chord progressions, exercises to memorize the note structure of the fretboard, music theory study, and get some tab or something for some songs you like, too--but this book can easily be your daily motivation.
==================
SIX MONTH UPDATE

Today I started week 27 of 52 in Guitar Aerobics. Yes, I've stuck with it 100%, and my opinion has remained absolutely the same as it was four and a half months ago. The only thing that has changed is my personal advancement system that I described before, which is now a week-by-week system where I perfect all seven exercises over the seven days in a given week, using both a metronome and the provided drum tracks, and then come the next Monday I start with seven new exercises and do the process over again. These daily exercises keep me immersed in a variety of techniques and genres and regularly challenge me with stuff I wouldn't have thought of on my own--and more often than not, with stuff that I wouldn't have ran into any other way--and my focus is form and technique rather than getting the exercise to "sound right." Not only has my playing noticeably improved, but I've developed new skills as well, my personal favorite being hybrid picking. I can say with absolute certainty that I never would have tried hybrid picking had it not been for this book.

Again, let me reiterate that my satisfaction and success with Guitar Aerobics is not because it's the most brilliant guitar book ever written or anything like that, but instead because it provides the core of the daily motivation that I lacked in previous attempts to maintain a practice schedule (in that the book becomes pointless once you start being careless about keeping up with it). It's not flawless. I do have a few gripes, but nothing that ruins the book and nothing that I'll list so as to avoid leading anyone into opinions they might not have had otherwise. I'll do a final update again in six months. Until then: If you are looking for a guitar book with lots in it, a wide variety of things to learn, and a structure that makes it easy to keep a schedule, then you certainly can't go wrong with this one.

I purchased this book at the end of December to give me something to do between songs I'm learning. I've been playing for 20 years and am still able to get some good use out of this book. The lessons actually make sense and build upon previous lessons. Granted I know a lot about playing, I'm still picking up on the little things that are improving my playing still. The key to this book and any other lessons book is that you actually stick to the regimen, otherwise what's the point?

I have a problem with this book. I'm not a rank beginner but I've never taken the guitar seriously or been able to make progress until recently, so I'm perhaps in a different place than most. Anyway, I like the idea of the book, it seems like a smart and natural way to improve your technique. After trying a few of the exercises I noticed improvement right away, particularly with the string-skipping exercises. The problem I have is with the incremental progression of the "daily" structure. The author seems to be saying that one, even a beginner, should be able to do 8 speed-incremental sets of 10 reps of, say, Monday's exercise in that one day, thereby mastering it and being able to leave it behind and move on to Tuesday's 8 sets of 10 session the next day. Are we really expected to go from slow to fast within 80 reps all in one day?

The muscle hand on the front of the book is no joke. That is exactly what this book does for you. It builds your hands and improves your technique. Forget about the lesson per day that is advertised. How fast you move through this book will depend on how good you are when you start and how faithfully you master each lesson. If you are beginner to advanced, I don't care who you are some lessons will take you a couple of days to master, particularly at the higher beats per minute. You are building and stretching your fingers, improving pick dexterity and muscle strength. Like all exercise your muscles will get tired as they build. It takes time. The one thing that is for sure is if you play each of these exercises at beats per minute you are suppose to progress up to, by the end of this book you will be a fantastic technician on the guitar. This isn't the only book you should buy, but it's should be one of the first ones. You still need some theory books and "how to" books on technique, which this book complements. The problem with the "how to" books is there are not many exercises, so they get boring quick. Guitar Aerobics has lots of interesting workout licks to practice and master. They are interesting because they are clichés of popular music of different styles. It's good and it's very satisfying because you can watch yourself improve daily and have fun while you are doing it. Highly recommended.

I really love this book. It's fits so nicely into my guitar playing. Every day I can spend perhaps 10 minutes on the daily exercise, and really learn something from it. There are many different genres of music covered, so I am learning things that really broaden my knowledge.

Great concept and execution!

I fit this into my routine of first performing technical exercises for things I'm trying to learn, then the daily exercise from this book, then the music I am playing or learning to play.

I look forward to every day's lesson. I just tick them off as I do them, and put a bookmark on the page I'm at. If I miss a day, I just pick up where I left off.

Oh...for most guitarists, well, we have a dozen books that we read on Amazon.com or were told by a friend were just absolutely great books to make us better guitarists. I should write "about a dozen" because eventually they get hidden, like unfound easter eggs, in closets, at the bottom of a pile of books, etc. This is a really good book and one that you'll actually use, which makes it unique. The exercises are each derived from something harmonically useful, like a pentatonic scale, so while you are getting better technically, you are also playing something that could be used while improvising-and as a big plus, the exercises are entertaining-not the same ol' Dorian, Ionian, etc. scales yet again. And the price is right...probably the most useful guitar book of its kind I purchased in the last 50 years of playing. Buy it; you won't be disappointed.

I think this is a really good book. I wish the audio content that accompanies this book had been organized a little differently, though.

This book comes with 2 CDs. The first CD has an audio track for each week. Each weekly track plays thru all the licks for that week so you can hear what they're supposed to sound like once you get really good at them. However, for example, you can't just select Thursday's lesson of week 1 - it's just one audio track for the entire week, so you have to listen thru the previous lessons for that week to get to the one you want (they are very short - just plays the lick for each day, but it is still frustrating to not be able to go directly to the exact lesson you are interested in).

Disk 2 is a bunch of metronomes/rhythms at different speeds for each lesson that you can use to help get your timing down.

So, for example, this is how you might use them: let's say you're on Friday's lesson of week 2. You put CD1 in and select the track for week 2 to listen to ALL of week 2's licks. Then, you take CD1 out and put CD2 in to play the rhythms/metronomes that go with that lesson (as indicated in the book for each lesson). But, if you want to hear the lick again you have to take out CD2 and put CD1 back in and then play thru the entire week's licks to get to the one you are practicing.

What would have been really nice is if there was a separate audio track for each daily lesson that combines the example lick for that lesson along with the accompanying metronomes/rhythms. It's still a good book and the audio content is very helpful, just realize that it's a little cumbersome and frustrating to use the CDs that come with the book.

As far as the book itself, there are a couple of things that I really like. First, each day's lesson shows the music with notes, the tab, the chords and the strum/picking pattern. So, if you're familiar with any one of those you can see how it relates to the others. Second are the repeating techniques each week. Every Monday is 'alternate picking', Tuesday is 'string skipping', Wednesday is 'string bending', Thursday is 'arpeggios', Friday is 'sweep picking', Saturday is 'legato' and Sunday is 'Rhythm'. Where appropriate they are related to each other and build upon each other as you progress from week to week.

All in all this is a very good book and you will learn a lot of useful techniques. If a little more thought had been given to the organization of the audio content this would have been a top-notch package.