Guitar Fretboard Workbook

This book is amazing. I started to "learn" guitar 6 months ago. I thought I had a good understanding of the guitar fretboard. Once I started using this book I realized I was going about it the wrong way. If I had used this book as the first thing I ever learned about guitar I would be 10 times better now. Previously I had learned about 20 chord shapes, the major scale, and the minor pentatonic scale. I could play lot's of songs by reading tab and listening, but now I can create original music. It is so easy now. The easy part of guitar is the technique, to a point. The hard part is understanding theory and applying it to the fretboard quickly without much thought. This book makes that easy. Now I truly "see" the fretboard. I am also starting to "see" patterns from songs and understand exactly where they come from and why. Now, don't think if you buy this book and skim through it you will be a great guitar player. You have to actually use it. Follow their easily laid out directions and you will benefit greatly from it. Simple ideas like reading, speaking, writing, and playing in different combinations truly do work. It is more of a music course than just a book. I also purchased an ear training book at the same time, "The 12 Notes of Music". It goes perfectly with this book. When you can see, hear, understand, and apply music you will be a great guitar player. These two books can get you there. I spent literally hundreds of dollars on guitar books previous to these two books, only to use once or twice and collect dust. I am no longer looking for more guitar books. I am finally content, and ready to become a great musician. I hope you are too. Rock on!

I can't speak highly enough of this workbook. Within 3 months of working with this book a little bit every day and practicing the concepts suggested, I was able to triple my working chord vocabulary up and down the neck at all fret positions, and without having to memorize a thousand new shapes. If you work meticulously through this book from beginning to end in small doses, your knowledge of the fretboard layout will expand significantly. This book teaches you WHERE THINGS ARE AND WHY THEY'RE THERE so that you can then take that knowledge and apply it to the things you're learning from a teacher or by yourself from a method book or youtube videos. This is a supplementary learn resource, NOT a guitar method book. It will NOT teach you how to solo, specific playing techniques, or how to play a certain style of music; that is not the purpose of this book and if that is what you seek then you should either find a guitar teacher or one of the many self-taught venues like online self-pace courses or a good guitar method book. that includes audio and video. What this book WILL do is help you expand your chord vocabulary and scale patterns so that you can break out of always playing chords at the first three frets because you don't know how else to play them. Been learning some soloing but you're stuck always soloing a pentatonic scale at the same fret position because you don't know where else to play something? This book will show you how to figure out where on the fretboard you can experiment with solo in the key you're playing in, and how to figure out the scale pattern you should be using in order to play at that location of the neck, and WHY you're now switching to this pattern instead of using a different pattern. Etc. It's a great book. As with anything else you'll only get out of it what you put in.

I am a player of over 12 years now and finally realized that it was time I get serious about this instrument. Up to this point, I was able to sit with a program and learn songs at half speed and "knew" my scales but whenever I sat down with a jam track it just sounded like noodling. I could play some fairly complicated tracks but when asked to produce something myself all that came out was some scales and, at best, some quotes from other songs. I wanted to break this barrier and having studied music years before had a strong feeling my lack of theory was the disconnect. You can learn scale shapes but without theory they sound lame. You can learn chords but need some theory to give them direction. This book forces you to learn the fretboard (something I never bothered with beyond the 6th and 5th string), learn the CAGED method (I taught myself the three note per string shapes), Pentatonic and Major scale shapes in CAGED, focusing not on shapes but the notes contained and where within those shapes, intervals, arpeggios and from that point on more heavy duty stuff. This book isn't a learn licks book, instead it really teaches you your instrument. It sounds cliche, but this book has really opened up the guitar as well as made the scales much more applicable and understandable. Forcing you to use the arpeggios allows you to find notes of the progression within the scale and transform your solo from noodling to solid harmony. While this book isn't the magic bullet that will solve all of your problems most people here have, correctly, identified that this is the critical step from intermediate into advanced player. If you spend the time with this book and literally think about it during your free time to conceptualize and internalize the information, it breaks down most of the barriers in your playing. After this book, many things will make more sense and suddenly lick books, your favorite songs and other additional teachings will mean much more to you. For this reason, I am happy to have read and practiced the teachings of this book and recommend it highly.

Back in my much younger days I played percussion for many years so music theory isn't a completely foreign concept to me, but I'm relatively new to guitar so how it's applied to a fretboard is a brand new realm. For the most part this book is laid out well and contains a LOT of good, practical, and applicable information. I've been working my way through it as my guitar knowledge and proficiency has begun to increase, so a lot of this makes sense and is helping me to better understand how and why certain things work the way they do on the guitar. However, some of these chapters leave a lot to be desired as the information is fairly sparse and that makes the exercises confusing. For instance, while I understand triads and how they are constructed, for the life of me I have no idea what Mr. Tagliarino is trying to teach me in Chapter 14. The lesson is less than a page long before diving into a bunch of exercises that tell me to complete the close voiced triads and identify their patterns. While he lists C-A-G-E-D "cowboy chord" charts, he does so almost as an afterthought and then forgets to mention that these are the five patterns to which the exercises are referring (I think; based on the exercise answers I'm still a bit unclear if that's actually the case). On top of that, two paragraphs below these charts he mentions that "...we will see three basic shapes that repeat to cover the entire fretboard" and then "Don't expect to be able to play all six strings of these shapes at once. We will divide each of them into four small three string shapes". Okay, if we're seeing THREE basic shapes then how do we divide them into FOUR small three string shapes and the exercises reference FIVE patterns??? On top of THAT, the patterns as identified in the answer key look nothing like the patterns on the cowboy chord charts. For a rookie guitar player, this has made me dizzy trying to figure it out. Still a good book and I would buy it again, but obviously I'm going to need to pool additional resources that explain some of these concepts in a different way before I will understand everything Mr. Tagliarino is trying to teach me.

I've not yet this book for a year yet and it's literally reinventing me as a guitar player. I don't get nearly the time I'd like to practice/play so I need to make the most of it. I was initially self-taught and then did a private lessons for a few years prior to quitting due to health reasons. A few decades later the itch came back with a furry and I was determined not to squander it. I bought this book based on recommendations and am so glad I found it. The approach of this book assumes you're coming from nothing but motivation and the end looks darn scary to the likes of me, but I've seen nothing but steady forward progress that builds incrementally so that no step forward is too high to reach. The author has done an impeccable job of breaking down a complex subject and made it possible for anyone to learn. Some (most?) of music theory is so old that it often seems arcane and unnecessarily complex (or even wrong from a mathematical PoV). Yet it works and has stood the test of time... a LOT of time, so why fight it? I'm glad to finally be on the road that eliminates all the mystery. I can't imagine a learning approach any more straightforward that what's presented here. It's easy to understand and to skip parts that you might already know.

I have been using this book for a month now, I am up to the pentatonic chapters. This book is like the missing link for me, I always felt other books concentrate on teaching the notes of scales ( giving you the whole step and half step sequences to build them for yourself). This book focuses on mapping scales to the guitar fretboard, with the aim to give you a system to locate them up and down the fretboard. Chapter 7 has been reviewed as a sticking point by other reviewers but this is when you should roll up the sleeves and use the examples already illustrated to build the scales and fretboard maps for yourself. I used a writing pad to draw up the fretboard and mark out scales for each position for root notes A,B,C,D,E,F,G I did write out the scale notes and used them in the process. I don't believe the reader should be memorizing patterns and scales, this would take a life time, I think this is an approach you can use to analyze scale notes. So if I have a piece of music now I will identify the key, chords, scale and use these position maps to analyze the notes. With time this should help a number of things to happen :- 1. Get strong with fretboard knowledge (where notes are found) 2. Chords and scale knowledge will develop giving me an understanding of how music can be pieced together 3. Develop a reference point that will familiarize sounds by ear (scale note intervals in relation to chords) 4. With experience you will be able to call on scales with ease and translate quickly to guitar. I believe the book has already given me the tools to achieve the above. I can see the major and minor pentatonic analysis coming up soon and beyond that arpeggios, which I think will provide more tools to use for fretboard mapping.

I want to address chap 7 first. It does not come out of the blue as other comments have suggested. Quite the opposite actually, if you follow the book from the beginning. My guess is that some of the people who had trouble with it, went over the previous material to fast without completely understanding it, and the rest simply skipped around in the book till they found something they didn't know as a "starting point" and then wondered why it wasn't "fully explained". Having had the book for 3 days now, and yes I have previous background with the guitar, I found that almost from the beginning I was learning things I may not have always understood. I decided to go through everything, even if "I knew it already". This led me to breeze through chap 7 and didn't even realize it was the infamous chapter from the reviews I read before buying this book. There is no lapse in explanations as to how to do the exercises. As it states in the first pages, some, if not most of the lessons in this book will be based on the lessons before it. In conclusion, buy this book if you are at an advanced beginners to intermediate player who is self teaching and stuck in a rut. I have been in a rut for about 3 years now trying to learn to solo, and already this book has helped me immensely with my understanding of the fretboard, which I'm absolutely sure will translate to my playing.

A mí (que me formé con el teclado del piano) me ayudó bastante a ubicarme en el brazo de la guitarra.

Il libro si pone un unico obiettivo: farvi conoscere a menadito la tastiera della chitarra. Per anni mi sono trascinato dubbi, zone d'ombra, incertezze ecc. pur tentando di suonare in modo semi-professionale un genere particolarmente complesso come il jazz. Mi sono reso conto che tutto il proprio studio può essere vanificato da una non adeguata conoscenza dello strumento: il rischio è di un perenne "arrancare" con l'errore o la stonatura che vi aspettano dietro l'angolo. La filosofia d'insegnamento di Tagliarino è: SCRIVERE (dove sono le cose), PARLARE (enunciandole ad alta voce) e solo alla fine SUONARE. Ritengo sia un metodo molto efficace, che lui stesso ha elaborato e sperimentato con i suoi studenti alla Berklee. Nel libro sono affrontati vari argomenti come scale, modi, arpeggi, triadi, alterazioni ecc, ma sempre con questo unico obiettivo: capire DOVE SONO LE COSE! Il libro è in inglese ma non presenta particolari difficoltà, è un libro adatto a tutti: al principiante come al semi-professionista che - come me - si è lasciato qualche zona d'ombra nel suo percorso di studio. Acquisto assolutamente consigliato!

The 'Guitar Fretboard Workbook' is a good, comprehensive book for beginners, intermediate & advanced guitarists. It will build a solid foundation of music theory for the beginner & will strengthen the walls of the intermediate & advanced guitarist. Just flicking through this book I could see it was good at first glance. Clear diagrams, conversational & accessible text, comprehensive subject matter. This workbook is like Nintendo Brain Training for guitarists. It will keep you on your toes and sharpen up your skills. I rate myself as more of an advanced guitarist and I found this book very useful including the basic chapters which refreshed my knowledge. I suggest completing 1-2 chapters each day until you complete all 22. Trust me, its worth it. I highly recommend this book.

So far I have completed lesson 5, upto this I must rate it as five star item. Explanation is clear,you can have a really a mind blowing concept. I must say to all guitar learner just go for it.

Livro importantíssimo

Fantastic book for finding the patterns on the fret board and how they related within the scales.