Upcoming CD Released Free, One Track
at a Time
The tunes are all written, and I'm spending lots of time in the studio now. It's all instrumental rock, with an emphasis on melodic soloing and cool arrangements, with the requisite hot licks and some shredding here and there.
When the songs are all mixed and mastered, you'll be able to download one song for free each month. Every month the free song will be switched to a different one off the album. You can contact me to be notified when the CD is available or when each new monthly song is available. Just state your preference. If you give me your address I won't give it to anyone else. No time for marketing shenanigans. I will only contact you when I have new product!
Of course you'll also be able to buy the CD right away if you want CD quality, or if you don't want to wait for the songs. That would be nice.
Want to Play Better?
I'm always happy to answer questions about my books, about practicing, and about guitar playing in general. When someone writes me, the discussion ends up on my blog,
Barrett's Guitar Q&A (with the names changed to protect the innocent!).
My Latest Work
The idea for the Guitar Reading Workbook (click to buy it) came from Reading classes I teach to beginning GIT students. I gave them extra diagram exercises sort of like those in the Fretboard Workbook. They said it helped them learn and made the subject more fun, so I expanded the idea into a complete reading method book.
(Not to be confused with the Guitar FRETBOARD Workbook, which may be what you're after.)
After some concise explanation of a topic, you get a written exercise that solidifies the concept. Early ones might take about 5 minutes to complete. Later ones can take up to half an hour. The exercises differ from chapter to chapter. Sometimes you just have to write the names of some notes or chords that you see on the staff. In others, you write which beat number a rhythm falls on. Later, you'll read some tab and translate it into regular notation, or look at some notes and identify the chord they make, and so on. When you've finished the written part, you pick up the guitar, turn on the metronome, and play the notation.
Throughout the book I try to make everything as easy and clear as possible, so you don't ever have to learn two new things at once. But if you get this book, you should spend at least 6 months to a year with it. Go slowly! It starts out basic but takes you into some reasonably advanced territory.
This new book is available at amazon.com, or you can order it from any regular bookstore (if they don't already have it).
About My Teaching Methods
In every book, I give you exercises designed to reinforce and test your knowledge of the ideas just covered.
Sometimes I'll tell you it is OK to move on while still working on the previous material. In many cases, however, correctly completing the exercises is the only way of getting to the next level. Without mastering the previous section, the next one is impossible.
To get this cumulative mastery, the exercises force you to study the material from different perspectives, roughly reflecting Gardner's popular multiple intelligences theory. While I'm not prepared to argue its validity from a psychologist's standpoint, it does seem to be working for teaching music. The idea is that not all brains learn exactly the same way; various people tend to tackle new information using different methods, none of which is inherently superior to the others but just reflects a bias that can be brought into balance. For example, we can learn...
Aurally: We transfer sounds we hear into ideas we can describe or write. We hear the notes on the page as sounds in our heads before we actually play them.
Visually: We mentally picture how the notes we hear would look on the page, and how our fingers would look when playing them. We fill in diagrams of fretboard shapes from memory.
Verbally: We describe aloud what musical concepts the notation represents. We sing the notes.
Physically: We drill the finger motions that correspond to the notation, and we physically write notation for music we hear or compose.
Logically: We identify the basic music theory behind the notes. Are they in a major key? Minor? Do these notes form a scale or chord that we know?
Some of the above approaches will likely appeal to you more than others, and will present the easiest method for initially arriving at an understanding of new material, but all are important. By noticing which you favor and which you neglect, you can compensate to assure you really learn your lesson.
For example, I occasionally get a student who asks a lot of questions and thinks about music constantly, but doesn’t drill the movements enough to execute what he understands. This student knows what he is playing, but may not be able to play it with confidence.
Others might practice constantly but refuse to write anything down or give the name of the scale or chord they are playing. This inhibits their ability to compose parts for other musicians or to communicate in a rehearsal.
The exercises are meant to test your knowledge and get you thinking; visualizing and verbalizing as well as playing the new material. Natural resistance to doing the exercises is probably the source of some of the negative reviews I get occasionally: "I don't like the schoolbook approach," or "it's tedious," etc. I understand that sometimes it seems hard, but the idea is to make sure you GET IT.
| 
