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

by Troy Nelson

From the former editor of Guitar One magazine, here is a daily dose of vitamins to keep your chops fine tuned for a full 52 weeks. The guitar exercises cover several musical styles including rock, blues, jazz, metal, country, and funk. Techniques taught include alternate picking, arpeggios, sweep picking, string skipping, legato, string bending, and rhythm guitar. These exercises will increase your speed and improve your dexterity and pick- and fret-hand accuracy the more you practice them.

Genres: Music, Reference, Nonfiction

112 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2007

About the author

If there’s one thing certain about Troy Nelson—a life-long guitar player and author of top-selling instructional books Guitar Aerobics, Fretboard Freedom, and Rhythm Guitar 365—it’s that he knows how to keep busy.

Born in the small town of Viroqua, Wisconsin (population 4,000), Nelson picked up the guitar at the age 14, after months of begging his parents for an axe. He tapped into his savings account for a Harmony electric, a Fender Strat knockoff from the JC Penney catalogue.

From that moment forward, Nelson would spend hours each day, much to his buddies’ dismay, woodshedding in his bedroom, playing everything from Stevie Ray Vaughan and B.B. King to Dokken and Metallica.

“My friends would come to our front door on the weekends to ask me to hang out, and I’d say ‘no thanks’ and go back to my room to play guitar until dinner. Then, after dinner, I’d return to my room and play until my sister would bang on the wall to make me stop,” remembers Nelson.

When he wasn’t playing guitar, Nelson was the star quarterback of his high school football team. Though he received letters to play football from several of the state universities, Nelson chose music instead, attending Milwaukee Area Technical College, where he earned an Associate’s Degree in Occupational Music.

Following graduation, Nelson spent several years as a freelance editor for Hal Leonard Corporation, the world’s largest music print publisher, where he transcribed and edited many of the top guitar songs of the day. In 1995, jumped at the chance to work on a new magazine Hal Leonard was launching, Guitar One.

In 1999, Nelson moved with the magazine to New York City. For a decade, he worked tirelessly at the magazine, holding the titles of Music Editor, Senior Editor, and, finally, Editor-in-Chief.
“I’m quite proud of what we accomplished at Guitar One. What began as a start-up, evolved into the No. 2 guitar title in the world when I left in 2005,” remembers Nelson fondly.

After a decade of success in the music business, Nelson decided to pursue a career in his other love—football. After a stint in the media department of the New York Jets, Nelson headed south, to the University of Georgia, where received a Bachelor’s Degree in Sports Management in 2009, graduating with top honors (summa cum laude). While attending UGA, Nelson somehow found time to write his first book, Guitar Aerobics, which has become a #1 bestseller, with nearly 100,000 copies sold to date.

“As a guitarist, I wanted to write a technique book that would appeal to me; that is, a book that had a practical structure and music examples that didn’t sound like warm-up exercises. I wanted to compose music examples that guitarists could incorporate into their own music while, at the same time, improving their chops,” says Nelson.

After UGA, Nelson went on to work for several football entities, including the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the All-American Football League, Gardner Webb University, and BLESTO, a football scouting coop owned by seven NFL teams. It was during his time at BLESTO that Nelson had another book idea. The result was Fretboard Freedom, a book Nelson authored after work and on the weekends. Fretboard Freedom is a novel approach to visualizing and navigating the neck of the guitar—a concept that initially struck Nelson while he wrote Guitar Aerobics back in 2007.

Although life as a football scout was difficult to put on hold, music eventually pulled Nelson back into its clutches. He took a breather from other career pursuits and spent the better portion of 2012 authoring Rhythm Guitar 365 (Hal Leonard), the follow-up to Guitar Aerobics and Fretboard Freedom.

“Like my other books, Rhythm Guitar 365 contains daily music exercises—one for every day of the year—with this book focusing on rhythm-guitar playing, which doesn’t get nearly the attention that lead playing does,” says Nelson of his latest title.

Nelson currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with hi

Reviews

[Doug DePew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been playing guitar since the early 1980s as a hobbiest and songwriter. I'm a decent rhythm guitarist, but I never quite understood how to improvise on lead, and my dexterity wasn't good enough. I could accompany myself singing but was never what I'd call "good" on guitar. I bought this book to improve my skills as a lead guitarist. I've only been using it for a few weeks, and it is tremendous!

I've worked through the first few weeks of lessons, and my skills already show a marked improvement. My wife has even commented that she can tell a difference. I started at lesson one although a better guitarist could probably skip ahead. I love how the lessons are structured and build on each other. So far, each one gets easier to master because it's a variation of the previous week. It's great, and I am actually seeing improvement in my skills. It's amazing to see the transformation from beginning to end each week. I'm working the program step-by-step and it works.

I can't say enough good things about this program. It has made me a better guitarist. By the end of the book, I think I'll be able to say I'm "good" on guitar. Thanks!

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spend 15 to 30 minutes with this book each day and notice clear progress by the end of each session. Excellent drills.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a great find. I'm confident that any guitarist from late beginner to intermediate will find their guitar skills improving quickly and steadily if they use it as prescribed.

For each day of the year, Guitar Aerobics gives a short exercise with a few instructions from the author. The exercises slowly increase in difficulty. Each day of the week is dedicated to a particular area: alternate picking on Monday, string skipping on Tuesday, and so on.

These exercises won't serve as a complete guitar course. For one thing, they're fairly repetitious and would get pretty tedious if not supplemented by other material. I'd recommend using them as part of daily practice along with other material.

A few warnings: This book pretty much assumes that you're learning to play electric guitar using a flat-pick. If your main instrument is acoustic guitar, you'll probably have to make some adjustments when an exercise takes you well above the 12th fret, or asks you to bend strings in a way that's more practical with the very light strings usually used on electrics. If you're a finger-picker, this book may not be worth your while, since two of the seven areas revisited every week are specifically aimed at building flat-picking technique.

Apart from these limitations, I'll say again that any dedicated guitarist who uses this book should see their technical skill improving substantially. Strongly recommended!

I'm using the book now, so in about a year, God willing, I'll have worked all the way through it, and will plan to add some final remarks to this review.

[Dora · Rating 4 out of 5]

The exercises that Nelson provides turned out to be very useful. I saw a significant improvement in my technique over the months I worked on this book and I practiced only about 30-40 minutes a day. The only negative feedback I can give is that some of the exercises simply cannot be played on the acoustic guitar since there aren't enough frets (e.g. I could only partially go through the exercises that include the 20th/21st fret since my acoustic guitar only has 21 frets). Otherwise, the whole concept of the book is great. Personally, I sped up the program by going through 7 exercises a day for the beginner weeks and then 3-4 exercises a day when the the exercises progressed (you're supposed to only go through one per day). Though I'm not really a beginner so this tempo worked find for me. Regardless, the exercises are nicely conceived and very gradually get harder throughout the weeks so there is enough time to adapt and improve your skill set.

[Bojack Horseman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, makes you practice every day even though you don't have much time. It takes you through different styles, makes you learn how to really read sheet music, tabs and specially the metronome.

I would say that if you really practice for a few hours with the backing tracks and such you could do so much more, but giving a few hours per day might be really difficult to take over for 52 weeks, though the practice is nice.

[Shantanu Chaudhary · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing...everyone should try this one.

[Steve Mirasol · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do this every day, only 15 minutes a day for the past one month and it definitely improved my technique.

[Frank Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was doing weekly updates as I went through this for a while. Eventually I forgot about those and then I forgot to write a review when I finished (about a month ago I think). This was pretty good but not great, if you know what I mean? I mean, I liked the exercises for something to do when I was thinking, "hmmm what should I practice next." But sometimes, I didn't always fancy the rate of progression or the direction that each specific skill took. But that's ok, this still had some tricky stuff innit, which was fun.

This is designed like having scheduled workout days, like a leg day, and oh I don't know... arms day? abs day? (can you tell I never attend the gym.) But anyway, my point is that this is like doing a day for practising bends, and another day for arpeggios and so on, but I don't necessarily agree that returning to something once a week is the best way to advance. SO, after a few weeks or so, I ended up doing all 7 exercises each day for the whole week and then advancing to the next 7 exercises in the following week and I found that much more effective. Granted, very time consuming, but at the time, I had the time so it worked well for me.

In conclusion, I think this book and the exercises presented are worth checking out. I think like most exercise regimes you should take what you see and use it how it suits you best. (For example, running the exercises forwards and backwards and in all your favourite keys etc...). This book is at the very least, great motivation for doing a little practice every day and for that alone it is worth the price tag.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great text with some confusing/unfortunate spots where errors slipped through and some questionable finger choices. This definitely helped with my precision and speed and increased my comfort moving around on the neck

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay Book most of the exercises are similar from page to page

[BOT2K · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book for learning techniques. My technique improved rapidly. The challenge is it's boring.

[Matt Sell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent practice program to develop as a guitarist!