Troy Nelson: Guitar Aerobics | Guitar Method Book with Online Audio for Daily Technical Practice and Skill Development Across Rock Blues Jazz Metal Country Funk Guitar Players

I returned to the guitar 7 years ago after a 30year lag. As a beginner, the book was for me too much at once and after several attempts to make it routine I put it on the book case with the intent to return to it "at some point". Recently I have and I was right to keep it as opposed to relegate to a charity shop. My thoughts for what they are worth... If you are truly just beginning, then hold fire for 6 months or more. Get your hands and fingers toughened up , with an element of independence and basic rhythm. It does favour an electric guitar but don't be put off. You can work through this book with an acoustic (I swap between) and get the benefit. Set aside 5-10minutes only for the exercise. Concentrate on understanding the pattern very slowly and concentrate on getting it to the beat. The goal, get that bit right. It will seem dull and lack musical interest but this is more about skill than wowing the crowd with speed. Set timer and stop. To cement the skill, find a favourite lick that uses the concept of the exercise (I sought out a few bars from Pink Floyd). You don't have to but I found it more interesting to then spend 10 minutes putting the skill into a context of something I knew and therefore more likely to play it when just noodling around. If you try to get perfection at high bpm, you will stay there for a while or get frustrated. Move on and don't dwell; the exercises increase in complexity therefore tackling something harder each week is the progress you need. I was tempted to go back a few weeks and see if I was faster. I wasn't but was able to pick up the tempo by about 30% within 10minutes. I decided that was interesting but then just proves I am progressing in ability by following the program. As mentioned I returned to this recently so have been playing for many years. I started at the beginning but did two exercises a day as some I could master quickly. I did struggle on some (stuff I had avoided in the past). If you are an intermediate then the choice is yours. The author suggests entry points and I was tempted but decided that accelerating through the stuff I could do was better that ignoring it as I did have to work out some bad habits. My conclusion, this is a good structured routine that is varied, relevant to pretty much anything you may want to play, will give you a great sense of rhythm / technique and does not need you to spend hours a day. I give 5 stars only but I don't think it is truly for a start out beginner. As with an aerobics class (I have done one or two), you need to get the steps right in your mind apply to the rhythm before you can go crazy.

A specific technique for each day of the week gradually differing exercise over 52 weeks. However you go at your own pace. All exercises are written in tablature with a very brief explanation. Comes with backing tracks to help keep tempo Would recommend to people who've got to grips with the basics of guitar teachings.

I have just completed this 'course' and yes I stuck to the 52 weeks part, it took me the full 1 year of 52 weeks of practice but I digressed from the 1 exercise a day bit! Why? Well, early on I found out that however much practice you do on a given day it is in the repetitive nature of things that you really make noticeable progress (well, in my case that is how things tend to pan out). So what I did was practice all 7 exercises per day - depending on the complexity of the exercise that would be anything from a few minutes to several minutes of practice per exercise and roughly 30-60 minutes a day. What I found was that by practicing a given exercise for 7 days I got better at it than just spending 10 or 15 minutes on it and moving onto the next exercise the following day. In all fairness to the recommended routine, I just don't see how you gain anything much in the long term by spending one session on something, however easy it is. Right now I a have returned to the book after completing it and am going through it again - on the whole I am able to pretty much 'hit' every exercise at full tempo to a 'decent' standard and complete a weeks worth of exercises in 20 minutes or so - I do this to not only inform myself of how my playing has improved but also to fine tune certain skills that I am still developing. As far as the book is concerned, yes, it can be somewhat challenging and I think you might be better off with a year of guitar playing (or so) under your belt first, if only to lessen the frustration will will inevitably have when you come across some of the slightly more challenging exercises - and they will 'hit' you early on. If your a complete beginner do yourself a favour and get some practice in first, by all means buy it and see for yourself, try a few exercises and you will probably agree that it is something for the not too distant future. The exercises are pretty varied covering arpeggios, chord progressions, scales, riffs to name a few - they are all relatively short being mostly 4 bars. If I had any complaints it would be that 1) I wish chord charts were shown above the tab's and 2) A little more explanation of what is going on would have been helpful - the 'format' of 2 pages of tabs per week obviously restricted space, so it is what it is! If you are enjoying this book and want more I also recommend 2 other books from Troy Nelson which are also presented via a 52 week practice schedule: Fretboard Freedom: A 52-Week, One-Lick-Per-Day Method & Rhythm Guitar 365 Daily Exercises Developing Improving Gtr: Daily Exercises for Developing, Improving and Maintaining Rhythm - both books touch on similar ground to 'Aerobics' with the first being a somewhat 'easier' step into short riffs and scales and the latter concentrating more on chord and rhythm work and being somewhat more challenging, without a doubt this latter title is definitely not going to be 'fun' for anyone who has not got some solid foundational practice in place.

I got this book as a recommendation from my guitar teacher, and I can say it was a great purchase. It takes you through the most common electric guitar techniques in a progressive way. Exercises will increase in difficulty from week to week, but the difference is that a specific week will build upon what was done the previous week in such a way that it will challenge you just a tiny bit more. You'll definitely get better at playing the electric guitar without experiencing any frustration or discomfort.

Title says it all. Wanna make your fingers make magic? You just found your personal trainer. This is indeed a good book for training your fingers using various ways and techniques. Sometimes we get stuck doing the same exercises over and over again or we just practice a certain aspect of our finger movement and we give up on the guitar after seeing minor improvement. With this book you will be able to get a comprehensive exercise repertoire that will save you from a lot of hassle. All you need to do is practice. The exercises are already there for you. You may find it frustrating at first to try to memorize and understand an exercise before you apply it (at least i did) but the book compensates for that by having the exercises of each day follow the same pattern and evolve bit by bit. The audio that is provided with the book (both the ones on how the exercise should sound and the ones for the rhythm on various tempos) really helps as well.

small well thought out technical challenges for everyday practice. i have many other technique books that require you to work out by yourself a program. easier done than said. this takes all of that stress away.

As you can see. I’m a drummer. (And multi-instrumentalist). I practice snare (on a practice pad) every day with the famous George Stone book, Stick Control. But I also wanted a rigorous book to practice guitar. So I did a bit of research and got this. It’s amazing. I use it every day. I like it so much and have made so much progress in a couple of weeks that I have ordered others in this book series, like Piano Aerobics and Bass Aerobics. In the age of darting around from one disjointed YouTube video to another, nothing beats actual deep methodical and perfectly graduated study and practice like this. Thank you Hal Leonard for persevering. The online player is neat and has good features. Tempo stretch works well enough. And the loop markers perform well. Highly recommended. A bit of background in posture and technique and basic theory is presumed and this isn’t the first book to buy for a player just starting out, IMO. This is for someone who knows their way around the instrument - best if someone advanced has schooled them. Do not practice any aerobics book if you don’t know how to hold and play your instrument ergonomically. For best results, I prefer to play standing up and in front of a mirror (I turn around to the mirror after memorizing the day’s phrase). Anyhow best of luck to anyone with the tenacity to get through this book. Use a metronome. Start slow. If you can’t play it slow you can’t play it fast. Enjoy!

Today I finish Week 6 in this book, and I honestly have only good things to say about it. Well--only good things at the end of it all, that is. * Its day-by-day structure helps easily-distracted players like me keep a schedule. It will quickly become useless if you miss days, skip exercises, or try to use it irregularly. With that in mind, I've been able to stick with it every day, which keeps me playing everyday. Quite the feat. You COULD try to use it as a source for guitar licks, but that's not what this is meant to be and there are better books for that. * If one's serious about using this as the skeleton to their practice method, as I have, you actually have to develop an advancement system on your own. They don't provide one. You have the daily exercise in notation and tab, a couple short paragraphs on what it's teaching and a quick tip on how to properly play it, or how to get a little more out of it (such as switching up the picking style, etc.), the bpm speed range that the rhythm CD will provide, and a couple other small tidbits of information. Unless you're an extremely gifted player, you're not going to master even the first lick at its top speed of 112 bpm on the first day. You need to keep coming back to it for a while. Also, by the time you get to the first Friday's exercise, there's no way you'll master it the first day--I still goof it up. Plus, rushing through each one to max out the speed is not useful. You need to spend time with each one at slower speeds before cranking up the metronome. Such is basic practice knowledge. It took me a bit, but I developed a plan of attack that I like. I start each new exercise at the slowest recommended staring speed, so far 40 bpm in every case. Once I've practiced it for a while and feel that I have it down at that speed, I bump the metronome up +10 bpm to 50, and move to yesterday's exercise, which I did yesterday at 40. Once I have that down at 50, I go +10 bpm again to the day before yesterday's exercise, which I did yesterday at 50, and so on, all the way up to 10 bpm past the top recommended speed for the exercise a little over a week ago. On days when I don't have much time, I'll do my best to just quickly learn the new exercise so I can practice it more at 50 bpm the next day. Thankfully I've only needed to do that a couple times. At first I struggled with "putting away" the much older exercises when I get so far from them, but was able to relax when I reminded myself that . . . * Each day of the week is always the same technique area. Monday is always alternate picking. Tuesday is always string skipping. Saturday is always legato (hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides). Etc. In addition to that, each new week's exercise builds on or expands the previous week's, in most cases. I was actually getting frustrated with it at one point because of that. How many legato sequences can you build out of the same Am pentatonic scale? But then one week, it switched up dramatically enough that it felt new again. This at first seemed to me like lazy writing, but I changed my opinion. It is SO important that it is done this way. It's baby steps. Even advanced players need baby steps with new stuff and with mastering new techniques. Also, this helps my personal practice approach to the book--since, for example, this Thursday's arpeggio exercise is building yet again on the same ideas from the Thursday exercise from 2, 3, 4 weeks ago, I don't need to keep practicing those ones. I'm slowly building the complexity, which means I'm able to fly through the old ones without hindrance. With this slow build, however, keep in mind . . . * There are a LOT of exercises here. If you stick with this and actually do this over an entire year, it would be impossible for it to not improve your playing. That's not because the book is magical or something, or so amazingly clever, but because to do so means you're practicing regularly and advancing slowly but surely. At the start of my sixth week of this book, I was getting a little frustrated that I'd been at it for seemingly so long but so little progress in regards to the complexity of the exercises had been made. So I took some time to finally put both the rhythm CD and the exercise examples CD onto my iPod for easy access. Well, I had to type out and name all 53 tracks on the example CD, and got reminded about how many exercises there really are. Today I do exercise 42. Of 365. My weeks aren't even in double digits yet. So in the end, this is a great book if you use it exactly how they suggest. Don't make it your only book or source--be sure to throw in some scale sequences, chord progressions, exercises to memorize the note structure of the fretboard, music theory study, and get some tab or something for some songs you like, too--but this book can easily be your daily motivation. ================== SIX MONTH UPDATE Today I started week 27 of 52 in Guitar Aerobics. Yes, I've stuck with it 100%, and my opinion has remained absolutely the same as it was four and a half months ago. The only thing that has changed is my personal advancement system that I described before, which is now a week-by-week system where I perfect all seven exercises over the seven days in a given week, using both a metronome and the provided drum tracks, and then come the next Monday I start with seven new exercises and do the process over again. These daily exercises keep me immersed in a variety of techniques and genres and regularly challenge me with stuff I wouldn't have thought of on my own--and more often than not, with stuff that I wouldn't have ran into any other way--and my focus is form and technique rather than getting the exercise to "sound right." Not only has my playing noticeably improved, but I've developed new skills as well, my personal favorite being hybrid picking. I can say with absolute certainty that I never would have tried hybrid picking had it not been for this book. Again, let me reiterate that my satisfaction and success with Guitar Aerobics is not because it's the most brilliant guitar book ever written or anything like that, but instead because it provides the core of the daily motivation that I lacked in previous attempts to maintain a practice schedule (in that the book becomes pointless once you start being careless about keeping up with it). It's not flawless. I do have a few gripes, but nothing that ruins the book and nothing that I'll list so as to avoid leading anyone into opinions they might not have had otherwise. I'll do a final update again in six months. Until then: If you are looking for a guitar book with lots in it, a wide variety of things to learn, and a structure that makes it easy to keep a schedule, then you certainly can't go wrong with this one. ================== FINAL UPDATE Unfortunately I cannot hold my head high and say I made it through all 52 weeks. I got to week 44 and stalled in light of life and frustration with the monotony of this book and finally, after six weeks of not being able to stick with it anymore, put it away. I said in my last update that I didn't want to list any gripes that I have in fear that I would influence someone else to have those same gripes, where they may otherwise not. Well . . . I'll loosen that rule up a little in order to state what I think is a valid "heads-up" to anyone who sets out on the same quest as me: brace yourself for a lot of mind-numbing monotony; like, more than you expect. For example, every Friday is a sweep-picking exercise. You'll learn that there's a five-exercise (or is it seven?) cycle that gets repeated throughout almost the entire book. After about 25-30 weeks of this, it can become too much to bear. The authors fall back on this repetitive crutch for several other days of the week, too (though Fridays are by far the biggest place for it). This doesn't ruin the book--after all, it's about getting better at guitar and not about entertainment, so monotony is part of the deal--but I think knowing what you're in for a little more might help one to weather more of it than I eventually could. This is still a 5-star book in my opinion, though. As I've stated before, without this book providing the daily motivation, I wouldn't have advanced to where I am on guitar nearly as much. I had a solid 7-8 months of 90 to 180 minutes of daily practice largely due to using this book. I'll take it back out eventually, too, and maybe try to advance through it a different way or a different pace. It's by far the most important guitar book I own.

Ottimo per impostare un metodo di esercizio efficace per quanto riguarda i neofiti ma poco adatto a chi ha già esperienza. Consiglio l’acquisto a chi ha almeno 2 anni di pratica dello strumento.

J'aime beaucoup ce livre, il m'est très utile pour progresser sans professeur. Les exercices concernent la guitare électrique et plus particulièrement pour solistes, seul 1 exercice sur 7 concerne la guitare rythmique. Les autres domaines sont donc, Alternate picking, String skipping, Bending, Arpèges, Sweep picking et Legato. Les exercices sont tous placés dans un contexte musical réel, ce qui est appréciable Les exercices sont très courts, les conseils aussi. Noté que les techniques abordées ne sont pas expliquées en détails, soit il faut les connaitre, ou faire des recherches en ligne. De fait je ne recommande pas pour les grands débutants, mais plutôt pour ceux qui ont 2 ans de guitare ou plus . Perso je ne fais pas un exercice par jour mais j'en travail plutôt 3-4 par jour et je change toute les semaine.