The Guitar Gauntlet: A Compendium of Fretboard Memorization, Chords, Scales, and Arpeggios

This is a digital 121 page PDF text, which will be personally emailed to the customer upon purchase and be available for download. This is a guitar method book with an in-depth look into the foundational concepts of guitar and music theory.

Portion of the Foreward:

Welcome one and all to the Guitar Gauntlet! As you can guess by the title, this book is designed to issue a challenge to guitar players: do you have a confident grasp on the baseline knowledge necessary to command your instrument?

As is the case with many guitarist’s musical education, we tend to learn a mixed-bag of information ranging from memorization techniques, shapes, patterns, or short-cuts to unlocking the fretboard. Or we learn harmony and theory in a more generalized context, which often makes application to our particular instrument all the more difficult. What this book seeks to do is combine these disciplines and allow for us to understand the guitar using pattern-based methods while simultaneously reinforcing theory, intervallic relationships, and fretboard memorization.

From personal experience, memorizing scales, chords, and modes led to significant progress on the guitar. But there is also a kind of plateau that is reached when we can’t make associative connections between notes, or lack the understanding of how harmony and theory can unlock unseen possibilities. This book aims to change such circumstances.

As such, this text will be broken up into a series of chapters:

1. Fretboard Memorization
2. Major & Minor Triads
3. Major Modes, 7th Chords, & 7th Chord Arpeggios
4. Pentatonic Scales
5. The Harmonic Minor Scale

Each section aims to build on the prior by adhering to the same systemized approach to the guitar, and in many cases perhaps build on common knowledge while also allowing us to see this information in a new way.