Guitar Aerobics Exercises For The Advanced Contemporary and Traditional Fingerpicking Guitarist

Product Description Duck Baker's Guitar Aerobics, presents a variety of amazing and challenging exercises and arrangements. Both your right and left hands, as well as each finger, will receive a complete work-out. The traditional folksong The Wreck Of The Old '97 and Duck's original composition, Holding Pattern are used to illustrate various right hand picking ideas. This is followed by left hand techniques and ideas to increase the independence of motion of your fingers as well as exercises featuring trills, thumb-fretting hammer-ons and pull-offs. The Rakes of Waterloo is presented featuring left hand fingerings and techniques necessary for the ornamentation of Celtic melodies. Grace notes, slides and complex embellishments are demonstrated. Guitar Aerobics concludes with right hand slapping techniques and the tune The Dirtman Cometh. A detailed tab/music instructional booklet is included as a PDF file on the DVD. DVD is region 0, playable worldwide. About the Actor Duck Baker was born Richard R. Baker IV in Washington, DC in 1949 and grew up in Richmond, Virginia. His teenage years were devoted to playing the rock and blues bands before becoming interested in fingerpicking in local coffeehouses. Ragtime pianist Buck Evans was a major influence on Baker's developing interests, which by the time he moved to San Francisco in 1973 included rags, blues, old-time country, Cajun, bluegrass and New Orleans jazz. This variety inspired the title of his first solo record, "There's Something for Everyone in America," in 1976. During the next four years, Baker recorded four more solo records, including one devoted to swing, one to modern jazz and one to Irish and Scottish tunes, and appeared on nine others. He also wrote a book of fiddle tune arrangements and toured incessantly throughout America, Canada, Europe and Australia. He changed address almost as constantly, finally winding up in Europe for most of the '80s. He returned to San Francisco in 1987 and finally to Virginia in 1991. Most of his more recent solo recordings have featured his own compositions, an aspect of his work that has drawn particular praise from other guitarists. If Baker's insistence on studying and performing so many facets of folk and related music, from medieval European carols to avant-garde jazz, have made him somewhat difficult for the press to categorize, he certainly has earned t