Guitar Fretboard Workbook

This book is nothing short of amazing!!!I have been playing guitar for 20 years this month, and never took the time to learn much of the theory as it was always too much to memorize...Firstly, I recommend this book to the novice who just wants to learn a few songs just to impress some ladies - on up to the professional guitarists making a living on their 6 stringed' friend.Beginners: Don't be threatened. The first chapter is designed to get you familiar with the guitar. This book promises to make accomplished guitarists out of people first learning guitar within a year, and I believe with the discipline ANYONE can do it.Intermediate: This may be your next step to becoming one of the greats. This would have set me way above the rest of the students in all school and garage bands at my age.Advanced: (I consider myself to be between this and the next) It's not too late! You will make light work of this and jump leaps and bounds from where you left off. It will probably be most exciting for you.Professionals: You will already know a lot of this. This will help you fly through the book. By showing you shortcuts, you can access more notes, faster than you're able to drudge up from memorized scales and repetitive riffs. And of course one of the great things about being a good guitarist is being able to teach right!?This can be the ultimate workbook for your students. They will, (with your help) learn quickly too, and you may be able to expand your "skill range" of students you're able to teach. And your reputation will reflect. If you're anything like me, I can always use help with being more creative soloing and this book does that for me too.This book has ways, only for the guitar, to get around a lot of the boring parts of theory that you have to memorize. For example, instead of learning what note every fret is on the board one by one (which is important if you want to play professionally), this workbook shows you five simple patterns to memorize. You build on these patterns in each chapter until you can play any mode of any scale from anywhere on your guitar! You will automatically become familiar with the names and be able to figure out what every note is if you haven't yet memorized that the 2nd string 11th fret is a B flat.You'll learn everything you need to know about the fret board just by having fun with these root shapes and patterns.I learned to play by ear and over the first few years, I had been forced to memorize some of these root shapes, so I already knew somewhat of the importance of these patterns. I can and have jammed with some great musicians over the years, but one thing I felt I couldn't do very well was solo, unless I was familiar with the key and had memorized riffs I could slip into variations of the melody to sound good, and even then, I'll still hit an accidental and sound just as good as my one year old! I never took the time to memorize but a handful of scales; never enough to improvise or be creative with my solos.By getting familiar with these patterns and learning how they connect to each other and can be played everywhere, I found they would be the foundation to every chord, arpeggio, and scale that I did know and ever wanted to know!!You won't regret this creative way of looking at the relationships between the scales and arpeggios, and in a light funny way of presenting it to you. The book uses hands on, verbal exercises, and plenty of diagrams to show and explain to every kind of learner what exactly is happening in each chapter. Highly recommend!!!!Rob - Dadgigsopics

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.

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.

As a guitarist of many years’ experience, I found it helpful just to dip into those aspects of knowledge covered in the Guitar Fretboard Workbook, which I had tended to ignore in the past and to set out to improve my understanding of them. Within a short period of time I have already achieved satisfying results.The chances are that those beginning to learn the guitar who progress through this Workbook, one step at a time, alongside their existing practice routines will learn far faster than I ever did and with a more thorough understanding.Consequently, I would recommend this Workbook and its approach, as a supporting strategy to practical hands-on guitar-playing experiences, to beginners, intermediate and more advanced players, who wish to improve their understanding of the fretboard and related issues.

If your wish is to properly learn the guitar fretboard, then I can heartily recommend this book. Its name describes it accurately. It is a workbook, and the emphasis here is on work. You will have to work at the exercises, so if your goal is to master the fretboard, be prepared to invest the time and effort. Follow the authors advice, he tends not to mince words and gets right to the core of things.This is heady stuff, and if you have no knowledge of music theory, you will likely need to supplement this book with some other learning materials so that you can properly understand what is being described.Great book for someone who already knows how to play a few songs on the guitar and has a basic repertoire of chords.

The headline says it all -- this is the MOST IMPORTANT MUSIC BOOK I ever read and it single-handely made me a better musician. This book is for serious practitioners only -- as the author mentions in the introduction, you will need up to 1 year of practice to absorb the material in this book. I've been playing for 25+ years but never bothered sitting down and REALLY LEARNING THE GUITAR. Now, I can improvise chords, scales and arpeggios in any key. I can hardly believe how simple and straightforward the guitar fretboard is, once it is correctly explained like the author does brilliantly in this book. As an added bonus, I was finally able to play song I have had in my head for decades but didn't know how to apply to the guitar (or any other instrument). I am now reading other books by Barrett Tagliarino and enjoying similar results.I would only add 2 (very minor) things to this otherwise perfect piece of work:1. For some reason, the CAGED shapes are named "Root Shapes". I'm not sure if it was done for copyright issues, but I found it interesting the author chose to rename such a well-known concept. Not confusing, just odd.2. Fingering for the arpeggio shapes are sorely missing. I was struggling to play the arpeggios from the book until I found out you could start/stop on different notes as well as using a "rolling fingers" technique you can see demonstrated on YouTube. For those interested, visit the author's YouTube channel and to see him demonstrate his arpeggio playing technique. Nice to have, but no big deal, really.I highly recommend this book to any guitarist interested in really understanding the guitar, regardless of the type/style of music played. The knowledge you'll gain from this book will stay with you for the rest of your life. Rock on!

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!

Cumple lo que promete, te despieza y organiza el mástil y te explica cómo situarse en el mismo, el único detalle que añadiría es que lo hace según el estilo anglosajón, es decir, para ellos la primera posición según este libro empiezaría con la forma de C (Do), por lo que sigue el sistema CAGED real, lo cual está muy bien, pero luego miras otros libros o en internet y se suele considerar la forma de E (Mi) como primero posición y así hacia adelante, y de hecho es la manera en la que te examinan en rockschool, por lo que nuestro sistema aunque digamos que usamos el CAGED sería más bien un EDCAG por el orden que realmente seguimos en cuanto a las posiciones. En resumen, solo aclaro que existe esa diferencia pero tomes la "nomenclatura" que tomes, y sobretodo si no conoces el sistema CAGED con anterioridad, mientras te sirva para situarte en el mástil, eso es lo que cuenta, y este libro lo hace, no importa si en tu mente lo organizas de manera distinta a los demás ;)