Customer Reviews

Joe Satriani - Guitar Secrets

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book offers many excellent excercises that reveal the foundation of Joe's guitar prowess. The excercises are not fun and most of them are not easy, so you have been warned. The book is a complilation of articles that Joe wrote for the magazine "Guitar For The Practicing Musician". It consist of 41 lessons that cover everything from chords and scales to theory and whammy bar technique. If you have the time and dedication this book will help you develop some great guitar playing techniques.

I found this book so useful, from the background on Satriani's life as an up and coming guitarist, providing infinite inspiration...It gives exercises and much needed information, from three-note-per-string scales up to very rarely found information on natural harmonics. This book is a must have for any guitarist.

This books is a collection of half-to-one page lessons by the
Satch God himself. So you will be disappointed if you are
looking for something that explains everything in detail.
Satch assumes that you have already developed some technique and
have some(ok maybe a lot) background of music theory.
The concepts are laid out in a very
very concise manner all across the book. Each of the one pager
lesson tackles a very specific thing and the lessons are pretty
much independent of each other, except a few lessons that came
in group of 2s over couple of months in guitar magazine.
The book is obviously not the complete encyclopedia of guitar
techniques and theory but it does cover a lot of ground for less
than 10 bucks. Its got awesome lessons on ear training, scale
patterns, improvising, arpeggios. The book gets into lot of
uncommon and melodic patterns and chords. So it opens up
the whole new palette of sounds.
As mentioned before, all lessons are short & snippy, but most
lessons can be practised for weeks or months or years. You
will know that when Satch says "go and do this for all keys
till you can do it in your sleep"...

Joe's Guitar Secrets book is a collection of the Guitar Secrets (GS) column he did for Guitar for the practicing musician in the early nineties.

This book shows you many useful exercises for developing dexterity, a broader scalar vocabulary, and some very hip chords.

This book is of use to any beginner through advanced player and is a "must-have" for any seriuous satch fan!

"Guitar Secrets" by Joe Satriani, is a great collection of exercises, tips and techniques from a series of articles he wrote for one of the guitar magazines a few years ago.

Inside this little book you will find: helpful scale, chord and improvisation exercises, along with tips for improving dexterity, better understanding the fretboard, and getting the most out of your practice and playing time.

For those who may not be familiar with Joe- he taught some of the great rock guitarists of our time including Steve Vai, and even the lead guitarist from Metallica. Joe's mastery of the instrument, and innovative techniques are incredible! Get this book and work the exercises into your practice routine. You'll be glad that you did!

Also, be sure to pick up some of Joe's CDs and DVDs. To see the master in action, and get a great behind the scenes tour of Joe's stage set-up, effects pedals, and guitars check out "Live in San Francisco" available on DVD and CD. My personal favs from his CDs are "Crystal Planet" and one of his early CDs- "Surfing With the Alien". Listen to "Satch Boogie" or "Surfing with the Alien"- it will rock your socks off!!

I have about 400 guitar books and magazines and this is one of my very favourites. It has a fantastic range of stuff to get you going on the guitar. There are lessons to help your technical prowess, creativity, and knowledge. I found that all of these lessons led to other ideas of my own.

I don't agree with those who have said that this book is only for more advanced players. I gave guitar lessons professionally and often used stuff from this book as a basis for my lessons with beginning students.

You don't have to like Joe's music to enjoy this book. I just started playing guitar when Joe's column ended in Guitar Magazine, but those two columns I did read stuck with me forever. In this collections of all his columns, Joe will give you interesting ways to improve your improvising skills, create interesting chord progressions and ways to take things you already know and twist them into something new. This is NOT a book where Joe shows us how to play excertps of his songs, but more like what those lessons he gave to Kirk Hammett and Steve Vai must have been like.

After playing for 16 years profesionally and non, I have found that This book is very beneficial for not only techniques but for opening your mind for new idea's. I recommend this book for not only begginers, but for intermediates and advanceed players. There are not many books out there (not any that I know of)that teach good sound theory mixed with finger exercises, with 2 to 3 octave scale work outs and then has you to apply them immediately. Believe me, just like everybody else I have bought books, and video's that teach the principles that this one book teaches. But remember experience is the best teacher....so get out there and play and utilize everything you learn from not only this book, but every book and video you can get a hold of.

Let me first say that I'm not a big Satch fan. Not that he's bad, he's just not my cup of tea. Still, as a guitar teacher as well as a musician, I found this book to be incredible. It goes beyond the "Here's some scales and arpeggios now just go for broke" approach that most instruction books on soloing seem to take. There alot of great concepts that most would deam "advanced" and yet, they're broken down into basic intructions that anyone with a little theory knowledge can understand right away. Its a collection of his articles from Guitar For The Practicing Musician so the appraoch I would suggest in learning from it is to find a chapter and practice from there as opposed to start at the beginning and work to the end. And the price is very awesome for the knowledge it presents. Let me also say that this is not a "how to play like satch" book. Its more like "use these concepts to find your own voice" book.

Not only is Joe Satriani one of my all-time favourite guitarists but he comes across as an extremely generous person who is always willing to spend the time to teach others how to aspire to and to ultimately reach or even surpass his own very considerable heights. This book is just a collection of articles that he wrote for a guitar magazine from Sep 1987 to Jan 1991 and so it will inevitably be very short and summarised in most cases and so those expecting the usual guitar techniques manual will be disappointed as Joe is obviously unable to elaborate too much on his articles given the constraints of a magazine article format. However, he does share a great deal of nuggets in how to improve your technique although truth be told a lot of the "secrets" can be found elsewhere but still enough of them are rarely found outside of this book and so most guitarists will still find at least some of the articles useful regardless of their playing level. Depending upon how you approach this book you are either looking at an informative couple-of-days read or months of practice as it is obvious the content is the result of years of Satch experience. If you are looking at a techniques book that is structured and meant for sequential progress from chapter 1 onwards then this is certainly not for you as this will come across as a hodge-podge of ideas randomly scattered and collected into a book for this is what it is. If you couldn't get the original articles in the guitar magazines and want them collected now for reference then this is for you. Either way, guitarists of every level can certainly glean some aspect that they can apply to their current playing if they spend the time to practise the "secrets" within.