Master Flatpick

Chapter 1: Introduction & Overview 5
Chapter 1: Introduction & Overview
Welcome to Master Flatpick Guitar Solos
The
Master Flatpick Guitar Solos
program is a fully-featured interactive music
program with professional flatpick arrangements of 50 songs. Each song features
a flatpick guitar solo played by top studio musician
Marty Cutler
, as well as
accompanying piano (comping), bass, drums, and strings. There are almost 3
hours of flatpick guitar soloing in this program.
Learn how to solo like a master!
This program is an interactive learning aid, designed to help you learn to solo like
a professional flatpick guitarist. Musicians studying improvisation typically learn
by copying other soloists' performances. Since guitar is a "visual instrument", it is
easier to learn to play by watching the fretboard than by reading the music from a
staff. The on-screen guitar fretboard shows you exactly which notes and chords
are being played on the guitar. There are guide notes for typical positions for the
key, and note names, to help you learn the fret/string positions.
The purpose of this program is to help you to learn the art of flatpick
improvisation. The student who wants to lean to improvise flatpick music is
usually told to listen to some flatpick solos, and learn from them.
Unfortunately, the student often encounters some obstacles after receiving this
advice.
! There aren't a lot of flatpick solos available in written form.
! Many solos that are written out are of very advanced material, beyond the
playing ability of the student. For example, the student may struggle to learn
16 bars of a complex solo based on a modal scale, but finds it difficult to
widely apply this information to more mainstream flatpick songs with typical
chord progressions.
We have created a program that has a huge library of flatpick solos, based on the
following parameters:
! All of these solos are "mainstream" playing, based on typical chord
progressions.
! Most of the soloing uses eighth notes, or triplets, so it is playable by most
musicians.
! Each song contains 3 or more full choruses of music.
! Optional guide-notes display scale tones in the correct key. Note names are
provided to aid in note/fret recognition.
! You can see the solos on the on-screen fretboard, hear the solos, slow them
down, or step through them one note at a time.
! You can play along with the flatpick quartet/quintet as you learn the solos.
! The solos may be printed out for further study.