Ebooks for building musical skill and enjoyment

"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket."
- American proverb

Blues Grooves for Beginners and Beyond
Downloadable eGuide
© 2003 Darrin Koltow Eguide for Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, Macintosh in WinZipped PDF format

Blues Grooves for Beginners and Beyond shows you how to play blues shuffles, boogies, riffs and progressions. Playing blues rhythms is one of the easiest, quickest ways of getting great sounds from your guitar. This guide shows you how to get those sounds.

Blues Grooves teaches you

the basic 12-bar blues
turnarounds, riffs, and shuffles
how to create your own blues grooves
how to enhance basic shuffles with harmony notes
how to jazz up your blues with the dominant 9 sound and appogiatura chords
open position and movable blues
how to create riffs using arpeggios, as well as the mixolydian, pentatonic and blues scales

And much more. Details are here.

Guitar Chords: A Beginner's Guide
With MIDI files
© 2002 Darrin Koltow
Ebook for Windows 95, 98 and up. Self-installing executable, containing Adobe Acrobat (PDF) document and MIDI files. 90 pages. 1.5 Meg download.

Guitar Chords helps you understand harmony and chords on the guitar in a way that's engaging, musical and fun. Learn to substitute and combine chords; play Jazz, Rock and Blues progressions; transpose songs; put chords to a melody; play major, minor, dominant and other chords all over the fretboard; apply fingerpicking, alternating bass, arpeggios, and much more.

Guitar Chords features over 230 illustrations, including 180 chord diagrams. There are 25 tablature examples, each with a MIDI file. You'll also get charts for Rock, Blues and Jazz so you can begin sounding great immediately. Guitar Chords is the next step after reading the popular Playing Guitar guide.
Details

Making Music for the Joy of It
By Stephanie Judy
319 pages; Publisher: J. P. Tarcher; (November 1990)

Starting from the belief that we all have musical ability, Judy challenges popular assumptions about musicality. She shows how to remove self-limiting beliefs and avoid frustrations as you discover and express the musician within, whether you want to play classical, jazz, pop, be-bob, old time, or new wave.

Learn practical, precise tips for acquiring all essential music skills, including ear training, sight reading, music theory and more.

Purchasing info.

If you thought that making music was only for those who were "gifted" or "talented," you need to read this book. If you ever wondered how to turn practicing from being a struggle into being fun, you too should read this book.

No matter what kind of musician you are, The Maximum Musician helps you define success by your standards, and gives you tools to achieve that success. Details

Playing Guitar: A Beginner's Guide
© 2002 Darrin Koltow
Free Ebook for Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT in PDF format, about 400K

Have you ever seen someone play - I mean really play - the guitar well and said to yourself, "I wish I could do that."? Do you like the thought of having total mastery over an instrument, as though that instrument were a part of you? Well, you probably don't want this book then. This book can get you started toward being a player, but you have to do the work.

Seriously, whether you want to learn rock, blues, jazz, fingerstyle or folk, or play lead or rhythm, Playing Guitar will show you the foundation skills you need in a way that's clear, encouraging and fun. Also, you'll learn to play songs quickly, without sloshing through boring descriptions of scales first. Details

Praise for Playing Guitar, from Download.com:
"A very good learner's introduction. It meets its promise of being a guitar learner's basic intro."

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