Practising guitar is the way to a controlled play.
It has (at last) become obvious for us western people that learning to play music is not necessarily learning solfa. Ear, muscular training and nervous cconnections are the most important domains of practice for a future musician.
Skill gives the musician a range of expressive, melodic and harmonic possibilities wider and wider as the practice process is pursued.
One does not need skill to play music. For anyone sensitive enough, it is possible to express with a very few training, there is a lot of things to do on a guitar without technique, but after the exploration of the instrument, some musicians wish to get control over their play, in view to renew themselves and to acquire a larger vocabulary.
I've been teaching guitar for 25 years, but my first student was me.
At 17, I was playing several instruments, drums, organ, guitar, saxophone and flute. At this time, if someone wanted to learn music, one had to work classical music, or sometimes jazz. But teachers were rare, and I wanted to learn pop music.
Of course, guitar was interesting me, but the problem with this instrument was that it could not hold notes for a long time, like winds or organ. It is when I heard for the first time Robert Fripp playing guitar solos on "21st Century Schizoid Man" and "The Sailors Tale" on the live album Earthbound by King Crimson, that I finally decided to choose guitar as my instrument, and R.F. as my teacher.
But Fripp was far from Nice, where I lived, and he was far from giving any guitar lessons. So I took on my own to create exercises to develop my skill. Some exercises were inefficient, some were unreasonable but with time, I understood that a good exercise must be either focusing on one spot of mechanical difficulty, or simulating a real play situation with a more or less complex overlap of techniques.
After Shylock disbanded, some persons asked me to teach them guitar, and now, after more than 20 years of teaching, I realise that only a few of my students has been learning the electric guitar studies I created for my own skill development.
Among them are studies for "traditional tuned" guitar, including some I didn't composed like Bach's Preludes, very efficient to cover a wide range of difficulties on electric guitar, and studies for "New Standard Tuned" guitar, a tuning imagined by Robert Fripp (C-G-D-A-E-G from bass to treble).
My aim on this page is to share these works with those who already have a developed skill (beginners may have a rather hard time), and who wish to measure themselves with the (relative) dangers of overlapping techniques.
Robert Fripp has composed works for electric guitar (Fracture for example) which are very efficient as exercises, but which you'd better find by yourself as I'm not supposed (even not authorized) to let them feature on this page.
All these studies have to be played with alternate picking.
For the moment, three studies for each tuning appear on this page, in MIDI version, score version (under Finale) and Audio version(MP3)