The CAGED System and 100 Licks for Blues Guitar: Learn To Play The Blues Your Way!

You've probably heard of the CAGED system, especially if you are learning blues guitar. The problem is, most books on the CAGED system are difficult to comprehend, which means it's difficult to put CAGED into practical use.The CAGED System and 100 Licks for Blues Guitar: Learn To Play The Blues Your Way! solves this by breaking things into manageable chunks which begin to flow together the more you practice. I think the key is to take your time, don't get ahead of yourself, and simply follow the book and its instructions. Once you get through it, you'll understand how musicians throughout the years could easily adapt to a simple callout like, "blues in Ab" and everyone would know what chords to play.Next...blues licks. Who doesn't like blues licks? This book includes many blues licks which are quite good. I find myself referring back to the book, over and over again, to pick up a few licks and expand my use of the entire fretboard.Some of you may say, "this is expensive" but it isn't. It's less than a single guitar lesson, yet it will empower you to play more creatively, easily, and to link licksa to chord patterns in such a manner that your friends, bandmates, significant other, will all notice.

I have studied the guitar for many years. These days I am working with Blues, Celtic, and 60’s acoustic guitar music. Alexander’s book is teaching me to keep the music flowing when muscles moving my fingers disobey orders from the muscle between my ears.Many of us less gifted guitarists condition ourselves to stop and then restart when our fingers do not follow an executive order. Don’t let them do this, but embrace your love of the guitar and sequester for all time their cruel abuse of your musical sense! Take time to patiently train your fingers to dance through their erroneous ways! Joseph Alexander’s excellent book teaches the steps of this essential dance.Alexander dissects the fret board into easily digested portions that are clearly described and presented in diagrams. The diagrams evolve logically into licks. I purchased the Kindle version and zoom in on the diagrams to guide my fingers to the correct target fret. Zooming is good since it forces me to SLOW DOWN. At slow speed I can relax the moving finger(s) to minimize “jitter” along the shortest path to the target. I downloaded the accompanying audio tracks. Listening to these excellent tracks suggests how the diagram COULD BE translated into music; Alexander is not dogmatic and encourages you to make your sound. The simultaneous intake of visual and audio signals is the way to guide your fingers through mistakes in a musically satisfying fashion. Alexander suggests that as this skill matures you will discover and express your own musical ideas. These optimistic predictions are improving co-operation between my fingers and my brain so that I am moving closer to my musical goal.In the 30% of the book that I have studied so far, Alexander does not teach technique to pick the strings. This is as is should be given the book's objectives. I am working to co-ordinate p, i, m, and a of my right hand with fingers 1, 2, 3, and 4 of my left hand. If you have not yet settled into a method to pick the strings the time to do so would be while you work with Alexander's book.Overall, Joseph Alexander offers an excellent method to further guide you along the path of artistic guitar practice. His book and audio set make an effective and fun way to mini-improvise through mistakes and beyond. If you buy and patiently work with Alexander’s book, the joy that you experience when a guitar is in your arms will grow. I strongly recommend Alexander’s book to serious students of the guitar.

I usually don't write book reviews because I usually don't have very good success with guitar books. I'll write a quick story in hopes for other people out there like me who love playing guitar but somehow is stuck at the stage this book is intended for.About a few years ago, I decided to take on playing guitar as an adult. It wasn't easy for me as I didn't come from a musical background at all growing up but grew loving music. I think for any budding guitarist, you work yourself up and very hard at just playing simple chords and accompanying yourself and feeling very good about yourself and ready to take the next level to try to learn the craft and make the best imitation of Clapton, Page, whoever your guitar idol is... as they are pictured up on stage taking a electric and melodic solo...I hit a huge plateau at this stage. I read a lot of other Amazon 5-star books on improvisation; try to learn the fret-board, the different scale patterns and memorize these nifty licks in the style of "so-and-so". But try as I may, when I attempted to solo, I couldn't muster anything other than going up or down the scales straight in quarter notes. Then I read this book and I learned how to solo.At least for me, a lot of books try to teach by theory. Learn circle of fifth, how one scale relate to another scale, modes, the target tones of different chords, I was thinking so much about theory while I was trying to play that before I attempted to play even one note, a 12-bar blues had already went! This book approaches learning solo differently, it taught me how to do it by "feel". How?Basically, it focuses you on particular box of a scale on the fretboard (so you don't think too much), teaches you some pre-made licks specific for that box (so you don't have to think too much), but then devotes an entire chapter on "how to practice"; basically, how to use the licks you memorized to improvise, how to improvise a bit after you play the licks; this helped me tremendously, as I went from the first time just awkwardly playing the licks as they are, to being more relaxed and permutating the memorized licks, to improvising completely on my own after I got the feel of playing the licks and their permutations after awhile! The hands-on approach worked for me whereas the theory-based approach didn't!

Great book. I'm just playing guitar for my own pleasure these days and I never was any good at blues guitar, so my goal is to be able to play a half decent blues solo before I die. Thanks to the book I'm just beginning to both get organised and loosen up. I'd never heard of the CAGED system, which is kind of an obvious way of using chord inversions to base your improvisation around (like all great ideas, it's obvious once you've got it; as Alexander says, its like seeing the Matrix!) and its really helped to have the system spelled out so clearly and practically. I use this book almost daily -- there's a lot of practice material here. The accompanying music files are great to play along with. Organised and systematic. Probably the best guitar tutorial book I've used.

Having played from an early age (~25 years ago) I have a fair few tricks and methods I employ when approaching the guitar. However, I found this book really helpful in getting away from deeply-ingrained patterns that I tend to fall back on. I also found it a great teaching aid.The caged system is a really cool system for those learning blues/rock guitar. It opens up a method for achieving the sound of a vast number of players. Many licks will suddenly be much easier to play and have the same sound as the record - something students have often asked about when they have all the right notes, but it somehow doesn't sound quite right.It starts off very simply, so will be suitable for players with less experience (all but absolute beginners - if you know your basic chords and a few scales, you'll be fine). It progresses to very usable blues licks quickly and goes on to cover a pretty comprehensive range of basic major and minor scales.All-round, I'd recommend this to:* Upper-beginner/intermediate players.* Advanced players looking to get out of "over-learned" patterns* Teachers looking for a useful structure for a long-term lesson plan.The addition of a GOOD CD really helps -- It's possible to make one's own backing tracks, but one seldom gets around to it! ;)Overall: thoroughly recommended.

I have been playing the guitar for almost forty years so I have bought quite a few guitar books along the way. I can honestly say that this is one of the best books I have ever read and used to unlock the fretboard. The explanations are clearly set out and the exercises help cement this understanding. You have to persevere but suddenly it all starts to make sense. So if you understand how chords are structured and can play scales fairly well this is definitely a gem of a book. I bought a couple more from the series on the strength of this and was not disappointed.Highly recommended.

A great way of breaking things into manageable chunks that you can keep plugging away at, but later (after quite a bit of hard practice) allows you to link each scale position together. The blues licks are really good too, and I've found myself noodling along to songs and venturing further up and down the fret board, which I'd never bothered to do before. I found previously I was just learning solos parrot fashion, but now I'm spending much more time just trying to improvise while jamming with just about anything (it's amazing to see how well the blues scale blends in with everything from pop to rock and everything in between). Feels like it's going to be a long path to climb, but as my lack of ability to improvise was the most annoying part of my playing, even being able to make a start at sorting this aspect has gotten me back into my guitars.Lots of other good books out there I'm sure, and I've dug out a few other publications from other guitar gurus, but find myself continually going back to this at the moment. Only criticism I'd have is that I could really really do with an extension of this book in the form licks bordering on solos, I know it's my job to improvise and link each of the licks into a more substantial solo, but all the same it would be nice to have licks that cover more of the fret board to link each position together. I think this would just add another element to what is already a really good book.

I'm currently working my way through this book.I started playing guitar over 20 years ago and came back to the guitar after not really playing much for quite a few years. I've always been an open chord player, playing things "on" the guitar, and not really knowing how to "play" the guitar. This book is changing that!I'm still quite near the beginning of the book, but it has opened my eyes and I'm starting to see how the fretboard works. I still have lots of practice ahead, but it's so nice to know that, with good practice, I will get to where I want to be.A great book, well written, with very good quality audio examples and backing tracks to go with it (downloadable from the link in the book). If you want to be able to play the guitar, and not just a bunch of other peoples stuff on it, then get this book!