A Practical Guide to the Guitar
Munson Summer, 2002.
GUITAR MEDITATIONS Philosophy Left Hand Right Hand - Melodic - Pick Right Hand - Harmonic - Pick Right Hand - Melodic - Fingerstyle Right Hand - Harmonic - Fingerstyle Combinations and Rhythm Concepts Rhythm Concepts A-C Rhythm Concepts D-G Mental Cycle Introduction Fretboard Melodic A-B Fretboard Melodic C Fretboard Melodic D Fretboard Melodic D2 Fretboard Melodic D3 Tonal Melodic Tonal Harmonic Spiritual Cycle End
Welcome to A Practical Guide to the Guitar!
For a moment, just imagine what a guitar virtuoso would practice.
There are physical, mental, and spiritual skills involved in great guitar playing.
The guide has exercises for each of these cycles, and it is designed to played through over and over, in a learning cycle. Each exercise in the section is graded in difficulty from A to G, A exercises being understandable for beginners and the G exercises requiring extrordinary skill. The physical cycle covers physical aspects of guitar playing with ideas to create your own exercises, the mental cycle has fretboard and theory exercises to help increase vocabulary of scales and chords, and the spiritual cycle covers concepts to make your playing more expressive.The guide is only practical from the interpretation of the word from its root, practice.The impetus of this work was the classical guitar virtuoso Mauro Gulliani! One of Guilliani's major contributions to guitar pedagogy was his set of right hand exercises, which more recently Christopher Berg has explored in his books Mastering the Guitar:Process and Essence and Guilliani Revisited. These exercises explore as many possibilities of right hand fingerstyle arpeggios that Guilliani could imagine. In writing A Practical Guide to the Guitar, I wanted it to be an extention of that idea, but covering all aspects of guitar musicianship. In a way it is the cheat sheet to virtuosity. I can't imagine someone playing through this book and not becoming an amazing guitar player.
I hope I accieved my goal of writing the strangest, new-age guitar book ever. This was an ongoing writing project for me from 1999 to 2002. Unfortunately, the computer program and original files became corrupted and somehow were lost. All I had to show for hundreds of hours of work was the hard-copy - sometimes with notes for things to change - that in order to correct would require reconstruction of the entire page from scratch. A project for another rainy day, and so this is the existing manuscript. There are apparently pages missing from my scan into the computer (laminate sheets empty as if "someone" pulled them out to teach with on a given day with intentions of printing them again - but didn't get around to it before the files wouldn't open.) There are several sections at the end that remain uncompleted - and so technically this work is unfinished - much like Schubert's famous symphony - I'll let someone else fill in the dots later. Its a pretty cool book as it is. Imagine for yourself if you will, what I might have put in the blank spaces.
In 2002 I attempted to publish this book through Mel Bay, Hal Leonard, and Alfred - but no one was interested in buying it. Probably my fault because I tried to seperate it out into A books, and B books - not nearly as comprehensive. I think you have to see the entire manuscript to get it.
Over the years I have gotten very mixed feedback from most sections - just a testament that this book isn't for everyone. My good friend Phil Yates described it as Confucius writing a guitar book. I guess thats pretty accurate. If you are a publishing agent and want to re-typset and publish A Practical Guide to the Guitar I am open to that.
There are a number of ideas I owe to my guitar mentors Christopher Berg and Robert Newton. They have helped guide me into the musical madman I have become. Many thanks to them and I hope you will check out their books as well! Other teachers that in some way shaped my thoughts for this book are Wendy Valerio, Bert Ligon, Dorthy Payne, Fred Teuber, Jerry Curry, Cecil Fulmer and Lorraine Paris. There is no substitute for a good teacher, especially a teacher who can teach you how to teach yourself!
Many thanks to the hundreds of my students who have supported in some way this endeavor. Now we all have something to practice!
The cover art was completed free hand in paint from the image created in Pagemaker 4.0. It represents both the harmonic series upon which every sound is based - and also for the learning cycles we all move through to find our own voice.
This download is completely free of charge, although I will completely accept donations. So if you enjoy this book or get something out of it, please feel free to drop a line or a check! Follow your bliss!
munsonmusic@hotmail.com www.myspace.com/munsonsummer www.munsonmusic.com Munson Music 1200 Main Street Newberry, SC 29108 (803) 405-0570 (803) 271-1027
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