Troy Nelson Guitar Aerobics

Book Review: Guitar Aerobics by Troy Nelson

This book is amazingly good except for the audio content that comes with it. I think the audio content could have been arranged in a way that was easier to understand.

There are two CDs that come with the book and the first consists of audio tracks, one for each week that plays the different licks you need for the week. This helps you hear them and understand the sound by getting used to it. It is important that you go through all the lessons to get to any other lessons you want and this sometimes gets a bit annoying.

Timing is one of the most important things required to be a good guitar player and CD 2 helps you out by using the number of metronomes and different rhythms on it. Read the book to understand how to proceed and mix and match both CDs to optimize their usefulness. You can play the licks first to memorize them and then play the metronomes for the rhythm. Although changing CDs over and over again for licks and rhythms makes it a bit annoying, but if you keep your head then it’s worth the effort.

I think a separate audio track for each lesson accompanied by the licks as well as the metronomes and rhythms would have made a better and more useful CD. That being said, the book is still immensely useful as it is. The book contains each of the lessons along with musical notes, charts and chords plus strumming and picking patterns. The same techniques are practiced over and over again, which means every Monday there will be an alternate plucking drill, while every Tuesday there will be a jump rope drill and so on. All this and more makes this book one of the best guitar books available on the market and I would recommend any guitar student to use it.

Troy Nelson’s Guitar Aerobics is a smart and natural way to improve your guitar technique and comes highly recommended by myself and a friend who has played guitar for over 15 years.