Guitar Aerobics: A 52-Week, One-lick-per-day Workout Program for Developing, Improving and Maintaining Guitar Technique Bk/online audio

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.

Final update: after 6 months of working through this book I can say it have improved my playing a lot especially when used in conjunction with fretboard freedom Aerobics and Rhythm Guitar 365. One thing that is clear is that this book can and should be regularly revisited and practiced. I think it will continue to be a fixture in my practice regime as many exercises are excellent warmup exercises. My right hand technique has improved leaps and bounds. Even after months I don’t think I have mastered the material. Week 36 update: 3/4 complete and down the home stretch. As you go through the second half, the exercises do get more difficult, but remain a steady progression. I have not gotten stuck on any particular lesson that I couldn’t at least do 90% speed after 30 minutes of focused practice. Well, except for sweep picking. The great thing about this book, is just when the exercises start to get familiar, they change to something new. So there are similar exercises, which actually helps to integrate what you are learning. Week 26 update: I still really like this book and recommend it. The difficulty of the exercises does get progressively harder. But it’s done in such a gradual manner that you will barely notice if you did each exercise as directed. If anything it became a little easier by the time I got to week 26 since I started as beginner. I have noticed that my bends have become more accurate, and alternate picking string skipping and Travis picking have become noticeably better. Sweep picking and tapping are not as advanced, but that should get more attention in the second half. This book is really focused on technique and right hand practice which is exactly what I wanted. While each exercise is only two or 4 bars, there is a lot going on in each exercise. I would recommend only doing 1-2 hours a day max, and one or two exercises a day. That is more than plenty. Since this book is about building skill and technique as opposed to information, taking it slow and really mastering each exercise is key to getting the most out this book. I would only memorize those licks that you want to integrate into your soloing bag of tricks. I love the approach of this book and the authors other 365 series of books: Rhythm Guitar 365 and Fretboard Freedom. All three books could form the basis of a great daily practice routine. What makes this book and the other 365 books great is that they give you something new to work on every day. This is a great way to engage in deliberate practice and improve your play dramatically. You don’t have to think about or plan your routine, you just need to open the book and go. Guitar Aerobics is an excellent book to really get your technique chops in order. You will see Your picking technique improve dramatically and become intuitive as you work through this book. This book has a rather focused approach on what is covered and I love it for it. It is useful for beginners through intermediate players. I think even advanced players will get a workout out of the latter lessons. I would say it is the easiest of the author’s book in this series. But he gives you lots of reputation to really get the knowledge down cold. You defiantly get your money’s worth. It progresses at a very manageable pace, but If you approach the book as intended every day you have a great way to warmup a daily practice regime. The audio samples are good and very helpful to understand what you need to play. If you really want to supercharge your guitar progress I recommend getting all three of his 365 books and do a lesson or two a day from each for a year, I guarantee you will see dramatic results. Will you be Steve Vai? No, but you will be able to taller Steve Vai’s famous 10 hour practice routine. Don’t skip the audio files, use them to really see how well you are playing.

I think this is a really good book. I wish the audio content that accompanies this book had been organized a little differently, though. This book comes with 2 CDs. The first CD has an audio track for each week. Each weekly track plays thru all the licks for that week so you can hear what they're supposed to sound like once you get really good at them. However, for example, you can't just select Thursday's lesson of week 1 - it's just one audio track for the entire week, so you have to listen thru the previous lessons for that week to get to the one you want (they are very short - just plays the lick for each day, but it is still frustrating to not be able to go directly to the exact lesson you are interested in). Disk 2 is a bunch of metronomes/rhythms at different speeds for each lesson that you can use to help get your timing down. So, for example, this is how you might use them: let's say you're on Friday's lesson of week 2. You put CD1 in and select the track for week 2 to listen to ALL of week 2's licks. Then, you take CD1 out and put CD2 in to play the rhythms/metronomes that go with that lesson (as indicated in the book for each lesson). But, if you want to hear the lick again you have to take out CD2 and put CD1 back in and then play thru the entire week's licks to get to the one you are practicing. What would have been really nice is if there was a separate audio track for each daily lesson that combines the example lick for that lesson along with the accompanying metronomes/rhythms. It's still a good book and the audio content is very helpful, just realize that it's a little cumbersome and frustrating to use the CDs that come with the book. As far as the book itself, there are a couple of things that I really like. First, each day's lesson shows the music with notes, the tab, the chords and the strum/picking pattern. So, if you're familiar with any one of those you can see how it relates to the others. Second are the repeating techniques each week. Every Monday is 'alternate picking', Tuesday is 'string skipping', Wednesday is 'string bending', Thursday is 'arpeggios', Friday is 'sweep picking', Saturday is 'legato' and Sunday is 'Rhythm'. Where appropriate they are related to each other and build upon each other as you progress from week to week. All in all this is a very good book and you will learn a lot of useful techniques. If a little more thought had been given to the organization of the audio content this would have been a top-notch package.

Having worked with this book daily for a couple of months, I can now see why this is one of the best-selling guitar instruction books. This book is an incredibly well-crafted program of study that is successful in driving you to build proficiency in seven key guitar techniques. The book is 52 sets of facing pairs of pages, one pair of pages for each of 52 weeks. Each pair of pages contains 7 exercises, one for each day of the week. Each day of the week is devoted to a particular technique: Mondays are Alternate Picking, Tuesdays are String Skipping, and so on. Each exercise is a unique new exercise that you can usually pick up and make noticeable improvements on in about 10-20 minutes each day. This all adds up to 364 exercises that Troy Nelson has designed to fit into almost any day that you can spare 10 minutes for and get some real value out of. This book is just so well-designed, and the work that Troy Nelson has put into assembling these exercises is to help you succeed with it: - Because there's a new exercise each day, you get constant variety; there's always something new. If something isn't working for you one day, tomorrow's a new day and a new technique. It makes it very easy to come back to it the next day even if you felt defeated by an exercise or technique. - At the same time, there's a continuity from week to week of each exercise. Usually a given week's exercise for a particular technique is related in obvious ways to the one seven days prior. As you progress through the book, you rarely turn a page and start at square one, so it's very easy to see yourself improving as the weeks go by. - Finally, the exercises are all musical enough to enjoy playing, rather than just some finger motions on the fretboard. They're either a playful walk across a scale of note, or they're a fragmentary lick or riff that you could imagine playing in an actual song. Several of them I kept playing for several weeks, because I enjoyed them and really wanted to be able to perform them easily. Needless to say, this really helps you keep at it! Initially I was skeptical that the book was really "Beginner to Advanced," and I'm pretty beginner. I've seen some reviews saying you can't be too beginner for it. That may be true, but I'm also pretty beginner, and I went ahead and tried anyways. I'm glad I did, it was incredibly helpful and worthwhile. Most of the exercises are not as hard as they might look at first, and you can always take things as slowly as you need to before building up speed with repetition. If an exercise is too hard, I usually put in the time (10-15 minutes) getting it as good as I can get it, and then move on to other practice for the day. Over the weeks, I've noticed that I am still making improvements on the most difficult techniques, even if I'm not succeeding at them initially. So at this point, I'd encourage just about anyone to jump in and keep plugging at it for a few weeks, even if you can't do them very well at first... those technique muscles will build up. Finally, at a higher level, one of the things I'm come away from this book with is some great insights about how to design successful training and learning programs. Learning guitar is difficult, and it requires you to put in the work. No one else can do the work for you. The effort put into this material to give it abundance, variety, continuity, and intrinsic value is an incredibly powerful helping handed extended your way to help you put in the work and get the most out of your effort.

Ok, I enjoy this book but you have to create you own strategy around it. I like learning a new lesson every day. It motivates me to pick up the guitar and go right to this book and learn something new. It fits exactly to my style of learning. I am not a DVD guy and this helps give me what I need to do to keep progressing my skills. I also am developed my own strategy. I plan on redoing every daily lesson in a 10 week block. So, I start on Week one. By Week 10, I still practice my warm ups on Week 1 on every day and then I go all the way up to the most recent day lesson. Then when I get to the 11th week, I start on warm ups on Week 2 and play them all up to week 11. So, I am constantly practicing each daily exercise to make them more precise. I don't play one and then forget it. I play it every day for 10 weeks straight. Now, I am only up to week 8, I haven't essentially implemented this strategy but for now, it is my plan on doing so. Overall, the book is great for my ability to play and learn. I hope to start his other books when I complete this in August 2017. ***UPDATE#1: I have finished week 26 and still do the past 10 weeks of exercises. I am happy that I half way done and I have a couple things to note. First, my finger strength is really getting good. I can tell because I use one of those gimmicky 4 finger exercise tools and it is getting easier to do it, especially my pinky finger. But I also do daily extra finger exercises outside this book that I copied from YouTube. I am also learning the full Rust in Peace album by Megadeth. I started around the same time, I started guitar aerobics, working in them daily and I have to admit, it is getting easier to play those songs. Don't get me wrong, it has been a lot of work and I am no where near completing those songs but it is slowly getting easier to play. On average, I put in at least 90 minutes a day on guitar. In the past 200 days, I only missed 24 days of playing (11 of which was because I had surgery). I am still excited about this book and already have purchased Fretboard Freedom to start when I finish this book in August (hopefully). *** UPDATE#2: I just finished week 37. I am still progressing along pretty good. As other mentioned the daily lessons get repetitive but I tend to think it reinforces technique over and over to master it. I keep working pretty hard on clarity of notes and precision and I think going over similar structure is really beneficial to developing long term technique. For example, I find sweep picking easier and easier to do and now I implement subtle sweep picking into my improvising. I only have 15 more weeks to go (+10 extra weeks of follow up - as mentioned above) and less than 4 months feels like I am finally seeing the end at the light of the tunnel. I still recommend this book but it does take time to really fully dedicate to it. You really need to commit the time. I have a friend that recommended this book to me and he admires my tenacity at keeping up with it, he says he doubt he could've. With where I am at, I am committed to finishing the book and I started pre-reading Fretboard Freedom, so I can pick up when I finish Guitar Aerobics. ** FINAL UPDATE: Today, I just finished the last lesson. I feel this took my guitar playing ability to play to a whole new level. But this was a lot of work! I can easily tell that I am faster, more precise and my overall fretboard and music knowledge is 100x more than I started this. I am still weaning myself off the final weeks, like I explained above but each lesson, I feel I've mastered each lesson because of the time I took to really listen, practice and learn each lesson. Playing the same lesson over and over for 10 weeks, really helps make you think and sink in all the small thing of each lesson to perfect it. Now, I will start Arpeggio Madness by Rusty Cooley, then in 2 months start Troy Nelson's Fretboard Freedom and repeat Guitar Aerobics for the 2nd time in parallel with Fretboard Freedom. And I've already bought Troy Nelson's Rhythm 365 to start when I finish Fretboard Freedom/Guitar Aerobics tandem in 2018. I can say, I am a total fan of Troy's books and method of learning. If you want to get better at guitar, it is a no brainier. Get this book but be prepared to work!

I'm going to say up front that this is the best guitar book I've ever worked out of. I'm an intermediate level player, but the exercises at the start of the book would be great for beginners as well. This book gives you a different exercise to improve your guitar technique for every day of the year. It breaks the week into 7 different categories of exercises. Mondays are alternate picking, Tuesdays are string skipping, wednesdays are bending, Thursdays are arpeggios, fridays are sweep picking, Saturdays are legato (hammer ons, pull offs, etc), and sundays are rhythm. It recommends you work on each exercise for 10 minutes per day. I've worked out of this book as recommended for 4 weeks now, and I'm honestly shocked at how fast I have improved since starting. One of my favorite things about this title is that the exercises are based on real music theory and application. I hate most exercises to improve technique because they are chromatic, sound like garbage, and are unfun to play. Not the case with this book. The music tracks do work, despite what some the other reviews stated. As of March 2020 you can certainly access all the tracks online. I actually think this is another big strength of the book. You can download all the tracks from the website, but I actually prefer to stream because the website allows you to loop sections and speed them down or up as you work through them. I don't write reviews on amazon, but I have been so impressed with this title that I feel like I would be doing a huge disservice to the entire guitar playing community by not getting on here and singing it's praises.

I've been playing guitar for 25 years, and while I'm pretty good in some aspects of guitar, there's a lot of areas where I've never really put in focused practice on. This year I set a goal of playing guitar every single day and also getting a more structured practice routine together. I wasn't really sure where to start on a practice routine, so I bought this book to give me something to work on every day. The variety of exercises in this book is great, and there are definitely many areas that I benefited from the extra practice in. I especially liked the string bending exercises, as that's something I never really worked on prior. I will likely continue to go back to these exercises when I'm practicing string bending. I also liked the arpeggio and sweep picking exercises, and found that they helped reinforce the music theory I've been studying. Even though some of the exercises, especially towards the beginning of the book, were fairly simple to me as an experienced guitar player, I still found that almost all of them could be made challenging by speeding up the metronome. I will say that this book probably shouldn't be the only thing in your practice routine. It took me about a half year of experimentation, but I now have a daily 60 minute practice routine that hits on many different areas for 5-10 minutes a piece so that I don't spend too much time on any single area, to the detriment of others. The daily exercises from this book ended up just being a 5 minute exercise in my practice routine. But overall, I really enjoyed this book and found it beneficial to my practice. I've already bought another daily book from Troy Nelson, Rhythm Guitar 365, and plan to start going through that on a daily basis as soon as I finish this (I'm currently on week 44).

First of all, the exercises are great and build upon each other and are laid out well in a way that makes sense, even if the actual techniques aren't really discussed. 'Sweeping' is just pick in one direction and try not to make the notes ring into each other. You kind of have to figure it out yourself. The audio....sucks. First of all, the entire week exercises are back to back in the same audio file, so you can't loop them. If you use the online tool, the loop tool is garbage. Secondly, the book tells you the BMP you should play the exercises at, but there is no way to set the audio playback at a specific bpm. You can only change from 100%, but it doesn't tell you what 100% means. It's horribly laid out and pretty much a guessing game and a headache. Anyone would common sense could see the audio is all but worthless. Again, great book, but I really wish the audio was created by someone who actually tried to use it to practice.

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!

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.

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.