Beyond the joy of playing guitar.
Three signposts for the intermediate player who feels lost.
The real reason we play guitar is probably immersion, and being moved.
Focusing on your fingers, letting yourself follow the flow of sound. That comfortable state of total immersion, where the usual noise in your head disappears entirely. Playing like that — truly "alive" — has the power not only to move the listener, but to deeply move the player too.
What you need to feel that, always, isn't fast fingers — it's real fundamentals, the kind that create good rhythm and a good feel.
A supreme method, refined at Berklee College of Music, the world's foremost music education institution, and responsible for producing countless world-class musicians.
Why not step out of a daily routine of just tracing tab, and make a way of understanding music that lasts a lifetime your own?
1. Play Guitar with Your Ears and Your Feel
Dedicated to every guitar lover — a classic that changes how you see the fundamentals
- "I want to write my own phrases, not just trace tab."
- "I want to play with confidence in my own rhythm."
- "I want to play something 'alive' that reaches the listener."
If any of that sounds like you, this is the first book we want you to pick up.
Just as daily meals sustain our bodies, daily fundamentals sustain your playing. But most people turn that practice into nothing but mechanical finger exercise.
Every exercise in this book is simple, yet proven and actually used at Berklee. Feel for yourself the discovery that a small shift in perspective can pull endless learning out of the basic practice everyone already does.
2. Play Guitar with a Living Groove
Getting to the truth of "rhythm feel," and breathing life into your playing
- "No matter how well I lock to the metronome, it never feels good."
- "Without a track or drums playing, I lose the rhythm partway through."
Your technique keeps improving, but somehow your playing never sounds cool... That stuck feeling isn't a lack of technique — it's a lack of groove.
This isn't just a book of rhythm-keeping exercises. It's a book that builds the core of musical feel: how you sense rhythm with your whole body.
Strongly recommended for guitarists on the verge of giving up, telling themselves "I just wasn't born with rhythm." A moment is coming when your playing shifts from mechanical to vividly alive.
3. The Triad Approach: Conquer the Guitar with Three Notes
Change how you see the fretboard, and turn your ideas directly into sound
- "I've learned to copy a few songs and memorized chord shapes, but I can't get past that."
- "Even looking at a chord progression, I don't know where or what to solo."
To freely build phrases or improvise a solo, you need to see the connection between chords and melody in your head.
The key that opens that door is the triad — a chord's basic form, built from just three notes.
Music theory that looks difficult at first becomes surprisingly intuitive to apply to the fretboard with this approach. Once you see how the whole fretboard connects, your ideas flow straight out as guitar sound.
Author: Tomo Fujita
Professor of guitar at Berklee College of Music. He has taught there for over 30 years since 1993, with former students including world-class musicians such as John Mayer and Eric Krasno.
He also teaches Japanese students, and his own teaching method, built around groove, is highly regarded worldwide. As a player, he remains active on the world stage with powerful, blues-rooted improvisation.
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耳と感性でギターが弾ける本
Tomo Fujita
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Written in Japanese.
A guitar method with a new concept — train your ear, grow your sensibility, and play freely what you want to play — from Tomo Fujita, who teaches at Berklee College of Music, one of the world's top music schools.
Themes like this tend to turn into vague spiritual talk, but the exercises in this book are the same concrete, proven ones actually used at Berklee.
Each exercise is simple and may only take a moment, but the goal isn't to mechanically run through patterns — it's to train your ear and build your sensibility through practice.
Repeat a little each day, and you'll start noticing moments like "I could feel the melody in color," "I could hear finer rhythms than before," or "I played with real feeling."
[CONTENTS]
■1 Setting up your practice environment
■2 Rethinking basic fingering
■3 Feeling rhythm in your body
■4 Understanding scales by interval
■5 Learning triad harmony
■6 Developing blues feeling
■7 Changing how you listen to music
■8 Building habits that help you improve
