What I personally find the best method with this type of book is to learn say five, ten or whatever of the patterns until you are very comfortable with them. Then make up some backing tracks to play along with, using those chords but dig deep into the arpeggios patterns. Rip them apart and try to make some music with them.

Take a LOT of notice of the intervals and where they lye within each pattern, get used to finding target tones over the chord changes. This is where things start sounding great. You can begin to mix your normal scale playing and lick repitoire with the arpeggios, experiment with landing on the thirds and sevenths etc with the chord changes. The more you do it the more you gain the ability to fuse all your ideas together effortlessly into some great sounding solos. Takes time but well worth it.

Lee

From this review, it’s sounds like there’s no magic or secret formulas in this book, just a lot of hard work!

Off hand, I can’t think of any good books on the application of these scales because it’s not something I mess around much with myself, although as this site develops I will start looking into it.

It seems to me you probably need to brush up more on some advanced theory to understand these scales a bit more. The other thing is to decide how much you need to know about them. Your average rocker or shredder will use them differently from a jazzer. If jazz is your thing then you already know you’re getting into complicated stuff, jazzers spend years on this. You will have to get all the info you can find and live and breath it!

The average shredder on the other hand will play around with these types of scales without necessarily (but not always) understanding, or using them the same way as a jazzer would. They might throw a wholetone scale or lick over the top of an augmented chord and if it sounds good, they just go with it. They may also just use these types of scales over drone notes for a good effect.

They don’t need to understand them the same way as a jazzer otherwise their stuff will start sounding like jazz! So my advice would be just play around with them and see if you get anything to sound good, see what you get out of it. For example, sometimes I will play a diminished run over a normal dom7 chord and depending on the feel of the music, this sometimes sounds great, sometimes sounds wrong. After doing it enough times you get a feel for anticipating when it should work. So I can get to use these scales on occasion and it works okay but I can’t use them like a jazzer, even though I understand the concept.

None of this is necessarily helpful but it’s something you should think about because the application of some scales and ideas often vary between genres. It’s obviously a massive subject but if there’s something specific you don’t understand, ask away and I’ll tell you if I know the answer.

About not being able to incorporate the new scales… I find when I’m stuck like this the best thing is to break the scale down to a minimum, this could be as few as three or four notes on just one or two strings. Sometimes the problem is about a lack of familiarity. By limiting yourself like this for a few hours (or days even) it makes it a lot easier to get something sounding good.

Once this happens you gain the feel for what something should sound like, it gets your ear guiding you better and gets you more inspired. After this it’s a matter of slowly building on the scale or the idea just another one or two notes at a time. Before you know it, something good starts happening.

Good luck!

I agree with this review. I’ve had this book for awhile and never really liked it until recently. The best way to view this book is as and “odds and ends” to the first book in the series, Guitar Soloing: The Contemporary Guide to Improvisation. That book is by far the best guitar book I’ve ever owned and it has a great description of more basic scales (major and minor pent., Minor, Major, Dorian, and Mixoliydian). The Advanced book picks up where it left off but I don’t think it does a great job of giving any practical applications (like for the wholetone scale). Over all, I like this book because it familiarized me with these new scales, but I can’t yet incorporate most of them into my playing.