Customer Reviews

Progressive Rhythm Guitar For Beginner to Advanced Students (CD Inside)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I can't say enought positive things about this book/cd set. It introduces rhythm patterns and counts in an easily understandable format. It teaches styles applicable to all forms of guitar, including the common rhythms of jazz, country, ragae, and rock. The CD has helped my ability to follow complex rhythm and pick patters immensely. The CD is very user friendly. As an added bonus, I discovered the guitar track is on the right channel, so you can turn it off and play with the drum sequence. The ability to play with the drum tracks has helped my timing greatly and has been a great break from the metronome. The book explains as much theory as you need in order to understand what you are doing, but no more, which I really appreciated. Too many of the music books I have used previously either ignore theory totally or bog you down with it. For children, I would expect a 9 or 10 year old to be able to use this program well, so long as they know the basic chords and are able to make basic changes.

I would recommend basic familiarity with chords before using this book. It provides diagrams of the chords but immediatly begins presenting rhythm patterns, so you should be familiar with the basic fingerings. This book was worth the money just for the alternate chord fingerings which facillitate rapid chord changes.

This is a very general book, but the company puts out several geared to specific types of music, which I hope to progress to shortly.

I found Progressive Rhythm Guitar to be a helpful and very informative book. It is an excellent size book for the price and comes with a CD to demonstrate the examples in the book. The book is in lesson format so you can move at your own pace. The first section of the book deals with begginer players, basic chords, rhythms and progressions. The second part is more intermediate moving on the bar chords and advanced rhythms. The third section is for advanced players teaching moveable chord shapes, chord construction, and even more advanced rhythms. I found this book to be very useful to me when I started playing guitar and I've learned a whole lot from it.

I have been playing off and on for nearly ten years. I know a good deal of music theory, but not playing much it was mostly abstract and useless to me. This book provided a solid method of learning what I needed to become a more useful player when my true musician friends get together for a jam. The examples were good and quite entertaining. I have only two gripes: the CD is just awful. While the examples are good, the tiny, brash, unappealing guitar accompanied by Dr. Rhythm drums makes otherwise interesting progressions sound terrible. My second gripe is that there is no discussion of chord selection. The book presents two "turnarounds" and then significantly modifies them throughout the book without once explaining why or how.
Nonetheless, this is definitely one of the best "how-to" music books I've seen.

I used this book extensively when I first started to learn the guitar. The strength of this book is that it is a no-nonsense approach to learning open and movable chord positions, covering topics such as root-6 and root-5 chords, bass note picking, strumming techniques, and rhythmic timing.

The downfall of this express approach to learning chords is that it may leave you in the dark as to how to construct chords.

The most sensible way in my view to learning chords is to start by first of all learning the major scales and the cycles of fourths and fifths, then by covering major/minor/diminished/augmented triads (basic three-note chords), introducing 7ths/9ths/11ths/13ths and practicing chord voicing all over the fingerboard. This book assumes either you know about chord construction theory, or that you have a teacher or another book to explain these concepts. Others may feel otherwise, but I really don't think you can understand chords until you understand scales! It is a shame that this book doesn't address the issue.

To the book's credit, there is a very handy chord-formula chart on page 134 that shows the notes of all the chords in the book. There are also a section of appendices that will also aid your understanding of basic theory. Most of the examples in the book are on the accompanying CD, which is handy for practicing.

All in all this is a great book for beginners to intermediate players, however, if you are going to make a purchase, it may help to pick up Progressive Lead Guitar (by the same authors, also available at Amazon), which will help you come to grips with scales. You may also want to check out Jody Fisher's excellent Beginning Jazz Guitar, which although focuses heavily on Jazz, will teach you chord construction, scales, as well as improvisation.

I started learning guitar about 3 months back. I had a few of the Hal Leonard method books, and some other misc books I picked up. I didn't feel like they did a good job covering chords, so I picked this book up on a whim at a nearby music store. Hands down it's the best guitar book I own. The book has over 50 different lessons, and after a month or so, I'm about 1/4 of the way through it and getting better every day. Highly recommended.

To the Beginner: Get this book. Go from chapter to chapter. Work your way through this book and master the material especially sections 1 and 2. Become so proficient in this material that you can go from any chord to any other chord in a nano second. These are the basic fundamentals of guitar playing.

Ok- now to the review of the book. This is a pretty good book. It is well organized. A beginning guitar student could start with this book with absolutely no prior knowledge or experience. In fact, I can't think of a better book for a beginning guitar student to start with. The book teaches the open position chords, barre chords, the blues shuffle, hammer ons and pull offs, staccato, palm muting, arpeggio picking, 7th chords, 9th chords, sus chords, and basic rhythms. It has a lot of illustrations and a music CD with example tracks.

Only a little basic music theory is discussed. It's a good introduction and enough to tweek the interest of someone who might be interested in it, but it's not too much so someone who just wants to learn where to put their fingers on the fretboard can ignore it if they want to.

But it's only for beginners. Title suggests that the book is for beginner to advanced students. This is misleading. This book is for beginner students only. If you consider yourself an intermediate or advanced guitar student, then don't get this book.

Probably all of this material is available in one form or another via free lessons on the internet. Nevertheless, this book organizes the material so that a beginner can learn the fundamentals and not miss anything.

Finally, this book does not cover everything. There is still a lot to learn even at the beginner level. It does not cover a lot of territory that a modern rhythm guitar player should know. Triads are not covered. Power chords are not mentioned. Power chords. Please! I can't comprehend why the authors of this book decided to not include power chords. I mean come on! But despite these short-comings, it's still an excellent book for a beginner.

I have been following the "Progressive" series of guitar method books since day one. I've managed to accumulate nearly all of them. All I have to say is one thing. If you are serious about being a well rounded guitarist and musician, without the complex, boring, and pointless music method books their are out there today, then you need to get these books, study them, practice the lessons, and most importantly, review, review, review; this is what will make you into the musician you need to be. Based on a rigorous practice regime, and following the series of Progressive books, you can become a complete guitar professional from novice level within 1-2 years, providing you use all the tools available to you; books, CD's, jamming, theory, playing in a band, etc. Remember, most guitarists haven't had formal lessons, they've learned off records, CD's etc. but with this series of books you have a tap into what the modern guitarist needs to learn, understand, and use as an accomplished guitarist/musician/songwriter. Get these books for your kids, students, yourself, even your grandmother. They are the best!

Although there are several instructional books on rhythm guitar (and I think I have all of them on my shelf!, this seems the most complete. One shouldn't expect highly sophisticated rhythms from any instructional book, but what is presented here is more than adequate for success. The full range of chords and ways to weave them into the backbeat is clear and easily understood. Of course, serious players will go beyond this eventually, but at that point, no appropriate instructional book will be necessary....or available. I highly recommend this book.

I've gotten a fair collection of how-to guitar books. This is one of the best. The DVD is a nice mixture of short snippets to quickly show a technique, and longer "tunes" that require a bit of practice. And the book matches the DVD pretty well while filling out the lessons.

I wish I've bought this book before. Finally a book you can start from scratch and build up rhythm technique to create grooves and songs.
One of the great things here is that you learn to count music beats in differents styles to creat fun, and flawless rhythms. The variety of musical styles at first seemed like it would miss the point, but it actually helped me upgrade my musical vocabulary. And it is good because of the method used in the book - The first guitar book with a learning system that finally helps me.

Way better than " Complete rhythm guide to blues bands", " "rhythm guitar by steve trovato", "Complete rhythm guitar guide", and others I own.

The DVD that comes along is direct, cristal clear, unlike the majority of video guitar lessons.

Not all Progressive books are good, but most of them are really amazing.