Guitar Fretboard Fluency: Master Creative Guitar Soloing, Intervals, Scale Patterns and Sequences (Learn Guitar Theory and Technique)

Like any skill, you will get out what you put in. Expect to take a lot of time to get through this book. It will take patience and persistence. I've been working through the book for a few months now, and still have quite a bit left. I own a few other of the author's books, and by far this one has been the most challenging for me, even though I've been playing guitar for a while and consider myself to be at the intermediate level.Remember to adapt the exercises, schedules, tempos, etc. to make them work for you. This book should be treated as a guide, but you will need to do additional work to focus your practice.What I like:- The author writes in a clear, concise manner. That's consistent with all his books.- Most importantly, the author teaches you how to practice. Don't ignore the advice on setting a timer for each exercise and moving on when it beeps. There's too many exercises to get through on a daily basis to spend more than a few minutes on each, without getting burned out and leaving no time for creative practice (chapter 5).- There are plenty of exercises, with selected ones prioritized to let you focus your practice to get the most out of a limited amount of time.- The variations of the exercises are a great way to keep you from getting a false sense of familiarity with the concepts. They are also a good demonstration on how to vary your own exercises.- The author suggests a schedule of how to practice the exercises in each chapter, with target tempos.- The exercises only have the first two and last two measures written out. This is done to save space, which I appreciate on the Kindle version. You don't really need the full exercise written out.- Creative practice is strongly encouragedWhat could use improvement:- The author tells you to set a 30 second timer for each exercise. That's not long enough for slower tempos, but it's fine for reviews at faster tempos. Try 1 or 2 minutes when playing at the slow tempos.- The "practice with a timer" advice can be hard to use in conjunction with increasing the tempo. There is some advice on how to increase tempo, but it cannot be done in the timed practice approach to the exercises. However, I found that often I could just increase the tempo on the next day, though not up to the target tempo. If I find that I can't make progress on an exercise, I'll spend extra time to work on increasing the tempo.- There's no mention of how you should approach learning an exercise. Some will be easy, others will take time to get under your fingers. Contrary to the timer recommendation, I don't set a timer when encountering a new set of exercises. Instead, I take as much time as I need that day to get through two or three new exercises. I'll take the tempo slower than the recommended 60 bps if necessary.- While the practice schedules are good for a single set of exercises, there's not a clear way of practicing across chapters. For example, I initially found myself ignoring chapter 1 once I was on to chapter 2. Only later did I start incorporating reviews of the previous material (one or two exercises) as a warm-up to the chapter I am currently studying.- I think the author is over-optimistic on the time it will take to do the exercises. For example, I found myself spending two weeks on intervals in 3rds instead of one week. After that initial week, the schedule would have you incorporate 4ths, 6ths, etc. into a single week schedule. Again, that's fine for review, but for initially internalizing the intervals, I found it better to dedicate an entire week (at least) to those intervals.- While creative practice is emphasized, it comes at the end of practice. That makes sense, but the problem I find is that I've burned my entire practice time doing the exercises, and I need to step away to do other things instead of doing the creative exercises. I probably need to adapt better to my available time, but it can be mentally difficult to stop the exercises before you've completed them in each position.

I've been playing folk, blues, rock, jazz, and classical guitar styles regularly for almost 50 years. You will get value out of this book if you have already learned fretboard fundamentals such as you can find in Richard Daniel's Heavy Guitar Bible or Fred Sokolow's Fretboard Roadmaps series. Learning guitar is like building a pyramid. You need to learn things in a logical order and achieve reasonable proficiency on one level before building the next lever. The material in this book is well above the base.WHAT I LIKE:- All scale shapes are given in C-A-G-E-D boxes, which are muscularly efficient and will give you enough background to understand what you see in YouTube videos.- The patterns for practicing the scales will definitely train your ear so that you can start figuring out how to play something you hear or imagine.- A lot of attention is given to how to organize your practice plan. The author shared how he did it for himself and now you can attack that with discipline. Your progress will be directly proportional to the amount of time you spend practicing correct things. (Practicing wrong things over-and-over doesn't eventually turn right, it just makes wrong things into habits. Get help when needed!)- The book covers all the scales you are likely to need for most styles, and in all the positions.- The root chord embedded in a given scale pattern is clearly shown to aid in memorization. Most of the downloadable backing tracks provide keyboard, rhythm guitar, bass, and drums so that you can hear that context when you play the scale patterns.- Patterns for playing triads and arpeggios through the scale shapes are covered to train your ear to make better melodies relative to the chord changes.- There are exercises to move patterns around different tonal roots to simulate lead playing against a chord progression.WHAT I DON'T LIKE:- The Fundamental Changes series has dozens of books on a wide variety of topics. The website makes no effort to suggest a logical order for learning the topics. Further, the majority of topics are focused on single musical genres, making it more difficult to see generally applicable principles. At the end of the day, Joni Mitchell, BB King, Jimmy Page, Wes Montgomery, and Andre Segovia had the same 6 strings to work with. There are more similarities than differences. Most people will benefit from a logical development of these fundamentals with tips on technique and practice.- It's not made clear that you need to provide most of the creativity yourself.- Open position and long scale forms aren't covered, nor are explanations of all the chords that play against a given scale. (You can fill this gap with Howard R. Wallach's Complete Book of Scales and Arpeggios in Tablature for Guitar. Pairing the book under review with Wallach's book is a good idea for advanced players.)WHY I BOUGHT IT:Music has four inter-related fundamentals: scales, chords, arpeggios, and ornamentation. Scales are the key to all music theory. The chief differences between pros and amateurs are the level of internalization of the fundamentals, the ability to creatively adapt the fundamentals to new music, and ear training. When you're stuck, go see how someone good approaches of the fundamentals. So, if you have some fretboard background and have discipline, this book can help you break out scale traps and improve your ear.SUMMARY:There's no easy path to good guitar playing, so read the bullets on the front cover as long-term goals, not promises. Think of this book as a master class. When you're ready, it will be helpful. The same holds for the rest of the series.

It's a useful and well written book to advance further with your guitar playing skills

Very pleased with this purchase. If you are past the beginner stage, you can benefit from the contents. You will internalize the sounds of the most important building blocks of improvisation and break down big elements, like scales, into smaller more usable chunks like triads and arpeggios by traveling through each element in different ways. This helps the learning and application process so you are not doing the same thing, in the same way, over and over again and then it comes out in your playing that one way. While the many exercises in Guitar Fretboard Fluency won't (by themselves) make you fluent, despite the title, they will go a long to developing your ear and visualization of the fretboard. In my view to gain real "fluency", "mastery" or whichever term you want to use, you need to know not only how to move around the neck, but also to understand what you are playing. This way you are not just playing "dots" on the fretboard, which is something I did for way too long. If you internalize this material and use it along with other resources on music theory, scales and position playing and are willing to put in the reps, you will gain guitar fluency.

I thought it might be good to get a book about scales and caged to supplement my online lessons. This is not inspiring content at all! Lots of little patterns and practice routines to follow for days on end. I know it takes time, but was rather hoping for something a lot more inspiring than this. No real explanation of the theory - you have to buy 2 other books from them for that and read them in tandem! Really unhelpful in fact. "Now let's practice that using fourths", is the kind of bland statement followed by a little chart, with no explanation of what fourths are or why it might be a good idea. The author says in the intro that it's good to learn this in the context of creativity, but then sucks out any creativity in the way the material is presented.This does not seem a good way to learn.

The exercises are 'incomplete' as you are only given the first and last two bars of each sequence, leaving the learner to pick up the middle part themselves.If you're new to this, you end up left in the dark and stopping at the first exercise.How do I know that what I am doing is even correct?I checked some forums to make sure I was playing them correctly as other people had also had this problem and raised the same question. Low and behold, they were playing them differently.If you are teaching someone a method it needs to be clear and fully explained not with bits missing.Just pure confusion every time I pick it up.

Ive just started this book, but i understand what its trying to do- to ensure that you rely on your ears, rather than just finger memory, and it really is incredibly useful. I wish I'd had this book years ago. It requires a bit of effort from the student though- dont expect it to spell everything out for you- that would defeat the purpose. And take it slowly- i suspect some users of the book are trying to rush through it.I also bought the jazz chord mastery book by the same author, and thats very good too- i will be buying some more of these books, when ive digested the two books i already have (it will take months!)

Another great publication which is easy to follow with explanations, diagrams and plenty of exercises to assist in improving one's playing over the fretboard. Using this book is hard work but fun and enjoyable as one sees progress in one's playing. Helps improve confidence and enjoyment in the guitar. Highly recommended.

I've been playing the guitar since my teens (over 35 years) but Josephs book has opened a whole new guitar world for me. Cannot recommend his book enough.