Fretboard Freedom - Book/Audio Online
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Music
Fretboard Freedom - Book/Audio Online Details
Review "Troy Nelson looks to have captured lightning in a bottle with his new book, Fretboard Freedom. This 240-page volume (with CD) presents a surprisingly simple and intuitive approach for visualizing and navigating the fretboard via the same 52-week, one-lick-per-day method that propelled his last book, Guitar Aerobics, to the #1 selling guitar book on Amazon.com." --GuitarInstructor.com Read more
Reviews
Book Review: Fretboard Freedom by Troy Nelson.I'm giving this book a five star review, and my highest recommendation. Despite a somewhat goofy looking cover this is the best $12.50 (used) I've ever spent, hours of fun, and for a kid it really could make long term guitar lessons obsolete.I'm a 100 "licks deep" [ha] into the book, and let me describe it to you.Every week, 7 guitar riffs/licks, one a day. If you are an intermediate like myself, you will learn the daily lick in 10 minutes, and then you have your whole TV watching life to practice them during...ha ha!The first five licks each week are the same chord based riff in all five positions, so you are not only learning the chords in all positions, but melodic runs up and down the neck. So much fun, compared to years and years I've wasted [time and money] merely memorizing and mindlessly playing scales. These first five riffs are melodic, memorable, but generic enough, that you can disassemble them, and make them your own.What's brilliant about learning the same riff each week in 5 positions, and I hope you understand this.. it makes me remember the neck melodically, not just rote memory. I can be anywhere on the neck strumming chords, and if I need "that riff," lol, I can now hear it in my head, visualize it, and grab the son of a gun from anywhere.The last 2 riffs every week are a little flashier, and reminiscent of a guitar hero, like Hendrix, Clapton, Roy Clark, et. al. I usually learn these on Sat or Sun, when I have more time to commit.The book is so far thankfully free of the wanky hair band style playing. God, how that plagued me as a kid, when every damn magazine was transcribing hyper fast b.s. like Mr. Big, White Tiger...Lion, lol! I admire that level of skill, but this book is making me sound far more like a 70's player. The primary styles it covers are rock, jump blues, and some really great rocking country riffs too. You'd really be getting your "Big Star" on after completing this book, or your Mick Ronson/Ace Frehley.Every three weeks, the book brilliantly covers 3 different chords, but all the same root note. So for example, the first three weeks are learning C major, then C minor, and finally C dominant 7th. My musicians pals will immediately see the benefit of this, seeing how rock soloing generally flips back in forth between these three scales, over the same 2 note power chord. After the weeks, the next chord group covered will logically relate to the previous three chords. Yes, C, F, and G in the first nine weeks, and as some of you know, transposing that is 90 percent of rock songwriting.The effect of being increasingly able to visualize the neck for me, is I relatively quickly found myself sounding what I will describe as "Seeds as a mo-fo." Yes, flipping effortlessly now between those dominant seventh riffs, and my tired old pentatonics, Yes, I often visualize backing Sky Saxon's quintessential garage rock band, with strobe lights, go go dancers, people bursting through the wall in a gorilla suit, etc. Yes, in other words, I'm living the dream! Flipping to a major riff, suddenly I'm on that Cars/Plimsouls dream, visualizing myself in a striped shirt, rooster cut, on an Elliot Easton groove, or the Phil Seymour solo album tip.Oh, MOST important, access to the website. You get access to the Hal Leonard website, where every riff is not only there to listen and play along to, but get this, you can slow it down, and it stays in key! Remember the stone age, when you'd slow down a tape recorder to learn a riff, but the key changed? No more brothers and sisters. No too fast to learn riffs, where you can barely hear what notes are playing. Yes, many of the riffs are quick of course, but slowing it down becomes fun. When you start slow, you get on the David Gilmour vibe, digging on every long drawn out tasteful bend. Oh, and you can loop the riffs too! Nothing cements it in your memory like a riff played over and over at first 50 percent speed, then 60, then 70, then 80, then....weedle-ee-dee, weedle-ee-dee, weedle weedle. You get the picture.In conclusion, I've never been a guitar wizard, but if this book is penetrating my thick middle aged skull to the level that it is, any kid starting out would be a rock and roll maniac after finishing this brilliant course. I'd probably blaze on bass now too, after getting such a firm visualization of patterns on the neck.Get rocking kids.P.S. I would encourage the author to do a sequel, with more advanced chords, 6ths, 4ths, suspended seconds, etc. If a sequel was as fun as this, it could take me into Robert Fripp/Adrian Belew land...
