Essential Guitar Skill is a collection of graded pieces for technical study representing a particular approach that is relevant to the modern player.  These pieces can be commenced well within the first year of study.

The music is not avant garde but reflects, like some modern pop and film music, certain stylistic elements in 20th Century music dating from Claude Debussey and Eric Satie onwards.

The reason for choosing that particular approach is that it offers considerable rhythmic impetus to the study of technique.  It also represents a style well suited to an instrument so supremely expressive of myth, mood and mode.

It is true that some players aspiring to great technical prowess may experience a certain physical excitement from the practice of scales but most students have a healthy aversion to the meaningless and unemotional repetition of notes, especially within the limitations of the major / minor system in which the tradition of scale practice is still firmly entrenched.  The scales and arpeggios that a student is expected to know bear so little relationship to the forms and frequency of their use in actual music that their purpose seems sometimes rather obscure.  Nevertheless scales do help the student to acquire a knowledge of keys and the fretboard.  The scale is part of the player's vocabulary.  But a vocabulary is meant to be used.  This volume attempts to explore the possibilities of the scale as a musical statement and in its music, points towards linear improvisation as an alternative to scale practice. 

• The Major Pentatonic
• A Japaneese Pentatonic
• Seven Notes
• The Minor Pentatonic
• Six Notes
• Soleares Fragments
• Exercises in C Minor
• An Indian Pentatonic
• The Lydian Mode
• The Locrian Mode
• A Harmonic Minor 2 Octaves
• Scale Play in E Minor 2 Octaves
• Minor Scale Dance 2 Octaves from string 6
• Minor Scale Dance 2 Octaves from string 5
• The Dorian on a 2 Octave Major Pattern from string 5
• The Mixolydian on a 2 Octave Major Pattern from string 6
• The Dorian on a 3 Octave Major Pattern
• The Phrygian on a 3 Octave Major Pattern
• Minor Scale Play 3 Octaves
• The Ionian Mode
• E Minor Waltz Scale 3 Octaves
• Waltz on 12 Notes