This legendary book has celebrated its 40th anniversary. It teaches guitarists how to improvise in rock, blues, pop, country, and more. It includes a completely integrated explanation of scales and their arpeggios. The necessary harmony is available to help you see how to improvise, and the author uses popular scale sounds including pentatonics, blues, major, mixolydian and more. But the scales are used to highlight a particular sound. You do not need to become a "scale master" to use the book. In fact, the author advises against it!
Included are various techniques needed to play the sounds:
- the "roll,"
- double stop,
- hammer-on,
- pull-off,
- harmonized scales,
- string bends (of all kinds) and
- double string bends.
The minimum requirement for using the book is that the player be comfortable with barre chords - that's all! The book presents the familiar sounds of a major scale, and then introduces scales and fingerings that add the various blues, rock, and country sounds, one after the other.
In addition, the arpeggio fingerings are generated from the major scale fingerings, so when you're comfortable with a scale fingering, the arpeggio fingerings are already 'inside' it. Very simple to understand and to play!
This edition has the original content, but with enlarged diagrams, new typeset, layout, and additional new text.
All scales and arpeggios are diagrammed in grids so note reading is not necessary. Fingerings use an expanded CAGED system, which the author created before CAGED was popularized(1975).(They are the same fingerings used in his sight reading book published in 1974.) Lots of progression examples are included, and over 100 backing tracks for the entire book are available from the publisher.