AMA Rock Guitar Basics (incl. 2 CD's)

Shortened foreword: So here it is finally: my guitar book for rock guitar beginners and advanced beginners. As you can see from the book title, this book deals with the basic knowledge, i.e. the fundamental basic knowledge of playing rock guitar. Although Rock Guitar Basics was designed purely as a beginner's book, there are a number of topics that are interesting for both beginners and more advanced guitarists. In recent years, I have had the experience at numerous workshops and seminars that many guitarists deal too early with very demanding and mostly very solo guitar-oriented topics such as scales, technique, improvisation, etc., but basic things such as timing, chords, basics in harmony , ear training and reading music or such important things as song structure, finding a guitar part that works for the song or completely neglecting sounds. In this book I dedicate myself to precisely these weak points because I believe that being confident in these very basic (and mostly very simple) concepts helps you much more in practice, be it in the rehearsal room, on stage or even in the studio , as an intellectually demanding improvisation concept. The focus is on playing the guitar itself and playing the songs - "learning by playing", so to speak. That's why you'll only find a handful of technique exercises in this book, but when practiced over a longer period of time they are very effective. Which brings us to another important concept: time. You can work on and with this book for a long time. Give yourself enough time, and with a little patience you will make tremendous progress. When writing this book and choosing topics, I also had one goal in mind: playing in a band and the difficulties that come with it. So this is not a book for the total beginner, for whom the guitar is still a piece of wood with ribbons and checks on it. So it's not a bad idea to have some basic knowledge before you start reading this book. However, I have summarized what I mean by these basic knowledge for you in the first chapter, “Basics”. If you only come across material that you already know when reading and playing through this chapter, you can immediately move on to the next chapter. However, if you have major problems with this chapter, I would actually recommend that you solve these problems with the help of a "real" beginner's book, such as: E.g. “The New Guitar Book” by Jürgen Kumlehn. A look at the table of contents will tell you that the rhythm guitar is the main topic of Rock Guitar Basics , as it takes up the lion's share of a musician's everyday life. However, there are also numerous exercises and examples on the following pages that train you to play melodies. In order to make getting started with this book even easier for everyone, Rock Guitar Basics is written in a "modular system" like my other books. This means that you can work on individual chapters “modules” depending on your interest or “level of knowledge”. Since these modules do not necessarily have to be dealt with in the order I specify, but each chapter/module represents a self-contained unit, it is possible to start spontaneously into each chapter. You can also go through Rock Guitar Basics like a “normal” guitar school from the first to the last page. If you choose this route to work with Rock Guitar Basics , Chapter 8 might be particularly interesting for you! In this chapter I give you a detailed practice plan for 60 weeks of 5 practice days that will help you get the most benefit and progress with and from this book in just over a year. A very central point are the “projects” that appear in the book. They contain a hugely important step: learning through discovery - perhaps the most important aspect of Rock Guitar Basics . And then? Rock Guitar Basics is practically the cornerstone of my other guitar instruction books that have already been published. Once you have mastered and understood the following chapters, you have a variety of options for moving forward. If you like blues in all variations, you can continue working with my book "Blues Guitar Rules", which is a comprehensive textbook for blues guitar - from very easy to very difficult. "Rock Guitar Secrets" is my solo guitar methodology, in which I go into detail about all common playing techniques that are important for modern rock solo guitar, but also light to medium difficulty improvisation concepts. As a supplement to this book, I wrote "Total Guitar Technique", which contains many cross-style musical technique exercises on topics from "Rock Guitar Secrets". Concepts and techniques from 40 years of rock guitar with more than 250 licks in the style of Chuck Berry, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Gary Moore, Van Halen, Satriani and many more can be found in "Masters of Rock Guitar", another book that you can use as a... Supplement to "Rock Guitar Secrets" can be seen. In my teaching video "Modern Rock Concepts", I go beyond my books and use some of my own compositions to demonstrate how playing techniques and concepts from styles as diverse as blues, rock, jazz and country can be combined and applied in practice. Speaking of which, I almost forgot to point out that you can of course hear almost all of the examples from this book on the accompanying CDs.