Learn to Burn: How to Play Fast Using Speed Bursts (for Stringed Instruments)


Book Description

This book is written for string instrumentalists who want to learn to play faster. Students start with two notes and build to longer, more intricate bursts of notes. The book's simple methodology provides a strong mental and physical foundation for picking or plucking virtuosic passages. Although not written for bowed instruments, the methodology could easily be applied. This concise approach is a comprehensive system for learning to play fast, addressing all the variables specific to string instruments.




Extreme Rock Guitar Soloing


Book Description

In this expansive book, versatile Argentine guitarist and teacher Pablo Pescatore provides a masterclass in the theory behind creative rock soloing. From the ground up, he presents the theoretical building blocks of major, minor, pentatonic, and modal scales followed by triads and seventh chords in all keys, not just the guitar-friendly ones. Then he proceeds to analyze rhythm in all common and uncommon time signatures before delving into 20 exotic scales. Written in standard notation and tablature, the truly unique aspect of this book is the author’s insistence on improvising with an acute awareness of rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, and dynamic values—not just playing fast and loud in predictable patterns. Demonstrating his ideas in 120 audio examples and a final knock-out blues progression, Pablo encourages readers to write, sing and otherwise incorporate their own variations into their music, dramatically changing the audio landscape of rock guitar soloing. Includes access to online audio.




How to Play Fast Using Speed Bursts


Book Description

This book is written for string instrumentalists who want to learn to play faster.




Learn to Burn: 5-String Bass Guitar


Book Description

Are you unsure how to appropriately use that low B-string? This book and accompanying audio will show you how, and much more. The book starts you off with right-hand technique exercises to increase finger speed. Next, the material takes you through the scales and chords that comprise most western music, through the whole range of the bass. Before you know it, the bass will be lighting up with infinite possibilities. This freedom makes playing an extended range instrument so gratifying. The etudes section will get you thinking about idea development through an array of styles and time signatures, while simultaneously giving your chops a workout. You can use this book to help connect the ears, hands and mind. Be careful when taking this book to the woodshed because you might burn it down! Includes access to online audio.




Speed Mechanics for Lead Guitar


Book Description

Guitarskole.




Rock Discipline


Book Description

As the cornerstone for the innovative band Dream Theater, John Petrucci has rapidly become one of the most respected and talked about guitarists of the '90's. He has been featured in virtually every major guitar publication worldwide and was voted "Best Guitarist for 1994" in "Guitar" magazine and "Break Through Guitarist of the Year (1993)" in "Guitar For the Practicing Musician" magazine. This powerful and all encompassing book starts with a valuable segment on warm-ups followed by up-to-date practice concepts that address dealing with today's information explosion. John has provided detailed lessons concerning speed and accuracy using rhythmic subdivisions, chromatic exercises, dynamics and scale fragments. Other topics include picking through arpeggios, string skipping, sweep picking, legato technique and how to expand the color and texture of basic "power chords." Also included are detailed transcriptions and demonstrations of dozens of exercises, examples and special etudes ranging from easy-to-master to very challenging. All music examples are contained on the included recording and written in both standard notation and tablature. Book jacket.




Before We Were Strangers


Book Description

From the USA TODAY bestselling author of Sweet Thing and Nowhere But Here comes a love story about a Craigslist “missed connection” post that gives two people a second chance at love fifteen years after they were separated in New York City. To the Green-eyed Lovebird: We met fifteen years ago, almost to the day, when I moved my stuff into the NYU dorm room next to yours at Senior House. You called us fast friends. I like to think it was more. We lived on nothing but the excitement of finding ourselves through music (you were obsessed with Jeff Buckley), photography (I couldn’t stop taking pictures of you), hanging out in Washington Square Park, and all the weird things we did to make money. I learned more about myself that year than any other. Yet, somehow, it all fell apart. We lost touch the summer after graduation when I went to South America to work for National Geographic. When I came back, you were gone. A part of me still wonders if I pushed you too hard after the wedding… I didn’t see you again until a month ago. It was a Wednesday. You were rocking back on your heels, balancing on that thick yellow line that runs along the subway platform, waiting for the F train. I didn’t know it was you until it was too late, and then you were gone. Again. You said my name; I saw it on your lips. I tried to will the train to stop, just so I could say hello. After seeing you, all of the youthful feelings and memories came flooding back to me, and now I’ve spent the better part of a month wondering what your life is like. I might be totally out of my mind, but would you like to get a drink with me and catch up on the last decade and a half? M




Blindsight


Book Description

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




The Sense of an Ending


Book Description

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.




Ask a Manager


Book Description

From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together