Jon Chappell - Guitar Exercises For Dummies

6 Part 4: Chords and Additional Exercises Chapter 13: Building Finger Independence with Chord Exercises Practicing Inversion Patterns Playing Chord Progressions Practicing Pieces That Use Chord Progressions Chapter 14: Developing Strength and Speed by Playing Single-Note Exercises Moving Across the Neck Moving Along the Neck

7 Part 5: The Part of Tens Chapter 15: Ten Tips for Maximizing Your Practice Time Establish Your Practice Place Define Your Practice Time (and Stick to It) Establish Objectives for Your Practice Sessions Keep Your Accessories Handy Get Your Head in the Game Warm Up Your Hands and Fingers Start Slow and Work Your Way Up Isolate Difficult Passages Play Different Guitars Join the Club Chapter 16: Ten Ways to Improve Your Musicianship Get with the Rhythm Familiarize Yourself with Pitch Discover Harmony Perform Live for a Crowd Compose Your Own Melody and Improvise a Bit Train Your Ear to Hear Polish Your Playing with Expression Listen to Lots of Music Watch a Performer’s Body Language Test Yourself by Teaching Someone Else

8 Appendix A: How to Use the Website Relating the Text to the Website Using the Website Tracks on the Website Troubleshooting

9 About the Authors

10 Advertisement Page

11 Connect with Dummies

12 End User License Agreement

1 Chapter 1FIGURE 1-1: An example of guitar tablature, or tab .FIGURE 1-2: The anatomy of a chord diagram.FIGURE 1-4: Rhythm slashes.FIGURE 1-3: The anatomy of a neck diagram.

2 Chapter 2FIGURE 2-1: “Across the neck” chromatic warm-up.FIGURE 2-2: Diagonal chromatic warm-up.FIGURE 2-3: “Across the neck” whole step warm-up.FIGURE 2-4: Diagonal whole step warm-up.FIGURE 2-5: Open major chord warm-up.FIGURE 2-6: Major barre chord warm-up.

1 Cover

2 Table of Contents

3 Begin Reading

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Playing guitar is an activity that has so many terrific qualities. It’s 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 it’s 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 that’s what Guitar Exercises For Dummies focuses on. By picking up this book, you’ve 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 they’ll 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 what’s true for guitar playing is also true for swimming, running, golf, or Guitar Hero: You don’t 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 don’t 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 it’s 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 Chapters 3and 4to get you up and playing, and then in later chapters we provide more great practice opportunities but with less commentary (we can almost hear you sighing with relief). Also notice that Chapters 3through 12are 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 it’s best to tackle these pairs starting with the odd-numbered chapter, where we take a little more time to explain things.