Before the Boxes: The Alternative Beginner's Guitar Book

Read this first. This is not a beginner's method. Nothing about tuning, holding a pick, first chord shapes or strumming patterns. If you bought a guitar last month, it'll be no use to you yet.

It's for the player six months to two years in — someone who can get through a song on open chords and has just been handed the minor pentatonic box, or is about to be.

Every guitar teacher online starts with that box, because it gets a beginner making a solo-shaped noise inside ten minutes. What it doesn't do is teach you a single note name, or what any of those notes are for.

This book goes the other way round. The notes on the neck. The distances between them. The three notes inside every chord you already play. By chapter six you're improvising over changing chords, choosing notes on purpose, with no scale shape memorised anywhere.

The pentatonic arrives in chapter seven — as five notes you can name and find anywhere, not as a rectangle you sit inside. Same notes everyone else learns in week one, reached from underneath.

What's in it

Ten chapters: the notes on the neck in a fortnight, intervals by sound and by distance, one-string playing, triads and inversions, chord tones over changes, the pentatonic in its proper place, a twelve-bar blues built from all of it, and how to practise so it sticks.

Fair warning

There's a stretch early on where someone who took the box route will be making more noise than you are. And some of this is dull — naming notes is dull, playing one string when you own six is dull. Dull, done daily for two months, produces a player who can find any note, build any chord and solo over changes on purpose.

Read chapter one free before you buy — the whole thing is on the site: Read Chapter 1 Now

Instant PDF download. Also on Kindle and in paperback if you'd rather have it on Amazon.