Mark Phillips - Guitar Exercises For Dummies

Guitar Exercises For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931724

ISBN: 978-1-119-69456-4 (pbk); 978-1-119-74893-9 (ebk); 978-1-119-74894-6 (ebk)

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2

Playing guitar is an activity that has so many terrific qualities. Its artistic, expressive, inspiring, therapeutic, and even cathartic. Nothing beats the blues like playing the blues. Guitar playing is an effective and natural means for relieving stress. But its like sports, games, and any other physical endeavors requiring strength, speed, stamina, and coordination: The more you practice, the better you become at it. And the better you are at guitar playing, the more successful your music making efforts will be.

One of the best ways to become more accomplished in the purely physical aspects of playing guitar is to exercise your fingers the main agents of guitar playing to get them conditioned. And thats what Guitar Exercises For Dummies focuses on. By picking up this book, youve agreed to send your digits off to spring training. After going through the pages of Guitar Exercises For Dummies, your fingers will come out faster, nimbler, stronger, and more confident, and theyll be better team players as well. And because music involves the mind as well as the body, we give you tips and advice that will get you thinking. As Yogi Berra said, Ninety percent of the game is half mental, so we work on strengthening your gray matter, too.

In this book, we give you exercises that make sense in a musical context; that way, you learn useful things like scales, arpeggios, and chords all of which are incorporated into the songs and pieces you play. Your brain is the coach, and the following pages are your playbook. After putting your fingers through the workout regimen of Guitar Exercises For Dummies, they will be lean, mean playing machines.

Because there are real physical aspects to playing guitar, we recognize that whats true for guitar playing is also true for swimming, running, golf, or Guitar Hero: You dont get better unless you practice. And practice, in terms of the physical conditioning we talk about here, is known as exercise. Exercise is an efficient way for your body to practice moving specific parts in the way a given activity requires. Football players lift weights to become stronger and more powerful against opponents on the gridiron. Guitar players practice scales to become more facile at playing melodies on the fretboard.

This book is a reference you can jump into and out of at will. In other words, you dont have to read from cover to cover. Just head to the table of contents to find what you need to practice at any given moment. But its worth noting that we present scales, arpeggios, and chords in a logical, organized way that allows you to train your fingers and learn the musical vocabulary that comes up time and again in real-life musical situations. We explain the exercise presentation most thoroughly in are grouped in pairs, where the first, odd-numbered chapter in the pair introduces a new concept (such as a scale or arpeggio pattern) and the second chapter has you applying that concept in a series of exercises. Both chapters in each pair include helpful exercises, but to get the most out of these chapters and be sure you can easily follow along, you may find that its best to tackle these pairs starting with the odd-numbered chapter, where we take a little more time to explain things.

We think its also cool that all the exercises in this book are presented in movable form, which means you can move them anywhere on the neck without changing the fingering, because the pattern or form uses no open strings. A movable scale, arpeggio, or chord can be transposed to any key by simply shifting your hand up or down the neck to a different starting note and playing the same pattern. So though we present these exercises in specific keys, you can move them to any fret on the neck. We remind you of the exercises movability throughout the book, but we mention it here as well because its an important concept in understanding how this book is organized.