Guitar Arpeggio Studies on Jazz Standards [Anglais] [Broché]

This book is definitly a great resource on arpeggios and working them into your playing. It focuses on jazz, as the title suggests. First Mimi shows you a couple simple arpeggio examples and shapes, and then a few examples of ways to practice them over progressions. After that she gives you a few reference pages of all the arpeggio shapes you'd need. These reference pages are great. They have the chord inversions imposed on each arpeggio shape so you can easily see how they work together and easily match them up. So it incidently kinda helps you review chord inversions and drop 2 voicings.

After the reference pages, the arpeggio study section starts. The tunes are bases off real standards (summertime, night and day, all the things you are, etc). The arpeggio studies involve playing the proper arpeggio for each chord throughout the whole tune. She gives examples of how she does it and then provides an explaination of what she's doing in each bar and why. For example, she explains some substitutions she likes and such.

The book comes with a CD of Mimi playing each example. It's good to hear the examples played, but really not a necessity. It would have been more helpful if the studies had just the background rhythm/chords so you can practice playing arpeggios over them...rather than it having her arpeggios played over it. I've been entering the chords into Band In A Box and using that as a play-a-long to practice playing arepggios to.

There's an advanced section after the studies that I haven't gotten to yet, but she provides substitution ideas and things she likes to do with arpeggios.

Overall, this book is very helpful and covers the subject matter. I bought this book in the hopes that going through it would help get arpeggios into my playing, and so far by working on these studies it is definitly helping me learn the arpeggios by applying them. This book will probably always stick around for me because of the arpeggio/chord inversion references pages are useful.

This book is fantastic. If you are like me, you probably learned how to play guitar to pop songs. You learned chords and scales, and took a modal approach to solo instrumentals... then you try to play something progressive, and you realize that you're fairly limited: how do they do that?

This breaks the chain of confusion and gets you oriented to any number of jazz chord changes by learning arpeggios from the chords themselves. You can then "play the changes" for real; not having to hang onto some fixed scale or pattern (which gets boring to the listener). This has pop / rock / blues applications too (e.g. sweep picking uses arpeggios). I highly recommend this book as a kind of Rosetta Stone for the aspiring jazz / advanced improviser. I took a ten week course with Mimi before she wrote this book, and this book truly distills the main learning points that we all found so difficult to comprehend. With the CD, you can practice anytime, and you won't have to test Mimi's patience! I am so glad she wrote this book.

I own a lot of jazz methods and I would rate this one near the top in terms of usefulness. Besides relating the arps to chord types this method gives many examples of how to apply them along with very thorough analysis of application.

I highly recommend this book to those learning how to use arpeggios & chromatics to create interesting solos.