Why You Suck at Guitar

Why You Suck at Guitar

Author: Tommy Gordon

Publisher: Fretboard Media Group

Published: 2015-11-18

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13:

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Here's a book intended to challenge you. Here’s a book meant to inspire you. This book is a wake-up call to the global problems and roadblocks for you as a guitarist. This book is meant to be a reality check. Even if guitar playing is a hobby for you, your level of enjoyment and satisfaction will increase exponentially if you get better, start to like your playing and sound, and then continue to move forward. But if you aspire to be a part-time gigging and recording musician or full-time musician/guitarist, this book is filled with the ten reasons that are seriously holding you back. (It might even give you enough clues to help you teach guitar lessons for years to come!) I want you to attack any or all of these problems that apply to you, and get your momentum back as a guitarist. I’ve always believed that the expression “momentum builds motivation” is the key to developing as a musician. Once you’re truly excited about your playing, your creativity, and your growth, amazing things can happen with your music. If you’re here reading a book called “Why You Suck at Guitar” then it means that you’re finally ready to deal with those issues that plague aspiring musicians everywhere. It means that you’re brave. Brave enough to face the facts. I wrote this to help you, and not to make you feel bad — or worse — about your music. This is your wake-up call — a musician-to-musician intervention — with the goal of helping you get back on the right path. Music should be fun, and it’s always fun to get better. I wrote this to help all guitarists because I know that if we don’t like our sound, our abilities, or our playing, then music isn’t fun at all. It’s an annoying feeling. By the way, if you’re just looking for a book of guitar exercises, that’s not what you’ll find here. If you wanted to buy another book of riffs that some random musician-author thinks every guitarist in the world should know, that’s fine -- but maybe you don’t understand what being a real musician means. What you need is clear. You need a personal sound — and that takes a very personal, grounded approach. That means that you need to deal with some big, global issues in your music-making and not worry about which new lick or riff will suddenly transform your playing. On the other hand, if you’ve already totally decided what you — as a guitarist — need to do to get better, but you’re kind of pissy and stubborn about it, then may I suggest that you just go and do that thing. Don’t read this book to see if I can or will change your mind. Do what you want! Follow your musician instincts. If you pretty much know what you want as a musician, and you already have a sense about what you need to work on, seriously, just practice that! But if you do need some more input, some more ideas, some feedback, and a dose of outside inspiration, then you are my ideal reader because: 1) You want to get better now and 2) You admit that you don’t have all the answers 3) You have enough of an open mind to check out what I’m going to say and work on removing those roadblocks that apply to you.


Bass Fitness - An Exercising Handbook

Bass Fitness - An Exercising Handbook

Author: Josquin des Pres

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 1991-05-01

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13: 1476857245

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(Guitar School). The purpose of this book is to provide the aspiring bass player with a wide variety of finger exercises for developing the techniques necessary to succeed in today's music scene. It can also play an important role in a bass player's daily practicing program. The 200 exercises are designed to help increase your speed, improve your dexterity, develop accuracy and promote finger independence. Recommended by world-acclaimed bass players, music schools and music magazines, this is the ultimate bass handbook. The added use of photos makes the lessons complete!


Music Theory for the Bass Player

Music Theory for the Bass Player

Author: Ariane Cap

Publisher: CapCat Music Media

Published: 2018-12-22

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0996727639

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Music Theory for the Bass Player is a comprehensive and immediately applicable guide to making you a well-grounded groover, informed bandmate and all-around more creative musician. Included with this book are 89 videos that are incorporated in this ebook. This is a workbook, so have your bass and a pen ready to fill out the engaging Test Your Understanding questions! Have you always wanted to learn music theory but felt it was too overwhelming a task? Perhaps all the books seem to be geared toward pianists or classical players? Do you know lots of songs, but don't know how the chords are put together or how they work with the melody? If so, this is the book for you! • Starting with intervals as music's basic building blocks, you will explore scales and their modes, chords and the basics of harmony. • Packed with fretboard diagrams, musical examples and exercises, more than 180 pages of vital information are peppered with mind-bending quizzes, effective mnemonics, and compelling learning approaches. • Extensive and detailed photo demonstrations show why relaxed posture and optimized fingering are vital for good tone, timing and chops. • You can even work your way through the book without being able to read music (reading music is of course a vital skill, yet, the author believes it should not be tackled at the same time as the study of music theory, as they are different skills with a different practicing requirement. Reading becomes much easier once theory is mastered and learning theory on the fretboard using diagrams and patterns as illustrations, music theory is very accessible, immediately usable and fun. This is the definitive resource for the enthusiastic bassist! p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.0px Helvetica; min-height: 16.0px} This book and the 89 free videos stand on their own and form a thorough source for studying music theory for the bass player. If you'd like to take it a step further, the author also offers a corresponding 20 week course; this online course works with the materials in this book and practices music theory application in grooves, fills and solos. Information is on the author's blog.


Bass Aerobics

Bass Aerobics

Author: Jon Liebman

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1480351822

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(Bass Builders). Perfect for beginning to advanced players, this book with audio by world-renowned bassist and educator Jon Liebman provides a 52-week, one-exercise-per-week workout program for developing, improving and maintaining bass guitar technique. Liebman teaches: chromatics; scales & arpeggios; string-crossing and advanced patterns; slapping & popping; and more -- all in styles ranging from rock, funk and R&B to jazz, disco, reggae and more. Bassists using "Bass Aerobics" will benefit from increased speed, improved dexterity, better accuracy and heightened coordination not to mention an awesome new groove vocabulary! The accompanying audio contains all 52 workout grooves for both demonstration and play-along.


Your Band Sucks

Your Band Sucks

Author: Jon Fine

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0698170318

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• A New York Times Summer Reading List selection • A Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book of 2015 • A Business Insider Best Summer Read • An Esquire Father’s Day Book selection • A New York Observer Best Music Book of 2015 • A memoir charting thirty years of the American independent rock underground by a musician who knows it intimately Jon Fine spent nearly thirty years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music, and, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands “ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame.” Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after twenty-one years to tour Europe, Asia, and America, diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows, despite creeping middle-age obligations of parenthood and 9-to-5 jobs, testament to the remarkable staying power of the indie culture that the bands predating the likes of Bitch Magnet--among them Black Flag, Mission of Burma, and Sonic Youth --willed into existence through sheer determination and a shared disdain for the mediocrity of contemporary popular music. In indie rock’s pre-Internet glory days of the 1980s, such defiant bands attracted fans only through samizdat networks that encompassed word of mouth, college radio, tiny record stores and ‘zines. Eschewing the superficiality of performers who gained fame through MTV, indie bands instead found glory in all-night recording sessions, shoestring van tours and endless appearances in grimy clubs. Some bands with a foot in this scene, like REM and Nirvana, eventually attained mainstream success. Many others, like Bitch Magnet, were beloved only by the most obsessed fans of this time. Like Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, Your Band Sucks is an insider’s look at a fascinating and ferociously loved subculture. In it, Fine tracks how the indie-rock underground emerged and evolved, how it grappled with the mainstream and vice versa, and how it led many bands to an odd rebirth in the 21 st Century in which they reunited, briefly and bittersweetly, after being broken up for decades. Like Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Your Band Sucks is a unique evocation of a particular aesthetic moment. With backstage access to many key characters in the scene—and plenty of wit and sharply-worded opinion—Fine delivers a memoir that affectionately yet critically portrays an important, heady moment in music history.


Like a Beggar

Like a Beggar

Author: Ellen Bass

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Published: 2015-10-15

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 1619321327

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Featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac “Ellen Bass’s new poetry collection, Like a Beggar, pulses with sex, humor and compassion.”—The New York Times “Bass tries to convey everyday wonder on contemporary experiences of sex, work, aging, and war. Those who turn to poetry to become confidants for another's stories and secrets will not be disappointed.”—Publishers Weekly “In her fifth book of poetry, Bass addresses everything from Saturn’s rings and Newton’s law of gravitation to wasps and Pablo Neruda. Her words are nostalgic, vivid, and visceral. Bass arrives at the truth of human carnality rooted in the extraordinary need and promise of the individual. Bass shows us that we are as radiant as we are ephemeral, that in transience glistens resilient history and the remarkable fluidity of connection. By the collection’s end—following her musings on suicide and generosity, desire and repetition—it becomes lucidly clear that Bass is not only a poet but also a philosopher and a storyteller.”—Booklist Ellen Bass brings a deft touch as she continues her ongoing interrogations of crucial moral issues of our times, while simultaneously delighting in endearing human absurdities. From the start of Like a Beggar, Bass asks her readers to relax, even though "bad things are going to happen," because the "bad" gets mined for all manner of goodness. From "Another Story": After dinner, we're drinking scotch at the kitchen table. Janet and I just watched a NOVA special and we're explaining to her mother the age and size of the universe— the hundred billion stars in the hundred billion galaxies. Dotty lives at Dominican Oaks, making her way down the long hall. How about the sun? she asks, a little farmshit in the endlessness. I gather up a cantaloupe, a lime, a cherry, and start revolving this salad around the chicken carcass. This is the best scotch I ever tasted, Dotty says, even though we gave her the Maker's Mark while we're drinking Glendronach... Ellen Bass's poetry includes Like A Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), which was named a Notable Book by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973). Her work has frequently been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Sun and many other journals. She is co-author of several non-fiction books, including The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988, 2008) which has sold over a million copies and been translated into twelve languages. She is part of the core faculty of the MFA writing program at Pacific University.


Not Eating!

Not Eating!

Author: Greg Bass

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-02-18

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9781530067190

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You should know right now that your life can finally get better. Whatever you've been struggling with, for however long, can actually get better. Almost immediately. For real. I didn't know anything about Not Eating a few years ago but I was a dang expert in intransigent problems. I knew all about soul killing, life sucking problems that just wouldn't get better, but could always get worse. You may have run into some of these problems yourself, who knows. Marriage problems, money problems, friend problems, kid problems, food problems, health problems, drinking problems. I had them all doubled over, shaken up, and coughed out. Then through a series of events that I'll elaborate on a little later, I will just say God made it pretty dang clear to me that I was supposed to Not Eat and I was supposed to ask my wife Susan to Not Eat with me. So I did that. And she said yes. We were going to Not Eat for three days and then I would ask God to save us. Something happened during those three days and we realized we weren't ready to stop. So we kept Not Eating for 21 days. No food. No juice. No supplements. Just prayer. That right then was the beginning of the second half, the better half, of my life here on earth. Over the next year, Susan and I went on another 21 day Not Eat, a 40 day Not Eat, and a few other shorter Not Eats. Over a 13 month period, we didn't eat for a total of about 100 days. And God saved us and totally transformed our family. I realize from telling the story enough now, that if you don't know me or even if you do, you might think I am making this up. For the record, I am not making this up. It is true. But please please please do yourself a favor, and don't miss out on how your life can be transformed for the better based on whether you believe me or not. About this whole Not Eating thing, I know what you're thinking right off the bat because I think it too every time I do this. Here it is: Not Eating? Not gonna do it. No food? No way. I can't do it. It's going to suck. What about lunch? What about dinner? What about breakfast? And shoot, I'm kind of hungry right now. And then you go eat. Every person who ever Not Ate thought the same thing before they did it too. Here's some people who did Not Eat even though they wanted to eat: Moses, Jesus Christ, King David, Elijah, St. Paul, Gandhi, Cesar Chavez. And me, Greg Bass. One of these things is not like the other. So funny. But seriously, my name is in there too, even though I am ridiculous. If you knew me, you'd know it's not because I'm in the same league as great people from history. My name is in there because Anybody can Not Eat and get a miracle, even if that person is a big screwup. Like me. Or, perhaps, like you. So if you or somebody you know needs help, big help, and nothing else seems to be helping, maybe you should try: Not Eating!


Dust & Grooves

Dust & Grooves

Author: Eilon Paz

Publisher: Ten Speed Press

Published: 2015-09-15

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 1607748703

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A photographic look into the world of vinyl record collectors—including Questlove—in the most intimate of environments—their record rooms. Compelling photographic essays from photographer Eilon Paz are paired with in-depth and insightful interviews to illustrate what motivates these collectors to keep digging for more records. The reader gets an up close and personal look at a variety of well-known vinyl champions, including Gilles Peterson and King Britt, as well as a glimpse into the collections of known and unknown DJs, producers, record dealers, and everyday enthusiasts. Driven by his love for vinyl records, Paz takes us on a five-year journey unearthing the very soul of the vinyl community.