Neck Anywhere by Washtub Jerry

Has anyone used Washtub Jerry's book "Neck Anywhere" to learn chords?

Here is the website for anyone interested:

http://nexus.as.utexas.edu/~jrw/musicproj.html

Did you end up getting this book? I'm curious as well.

I'm curious too. http://www.ezfolk.com/uke/chords/ has chords all the way up the neck, but it is too overwhelming to learn for me.

I have Jerry's book. I bought about a month ago and didn't understand what he was getting at but I picked it up last week and now I understand a little better. What he teaches in the book is the movable chord shapes. He refers to them as neighborhoods and teaches them in four groups. I haven't got beyond the first neighborhood yet but I believe that once you learn the neighborhoods you can figure out which neighborhood a particular song is in and easily know which shapes belong to that key.

I think what confused me about the book at first is that he doesn't refer to the chords by name (ie C7, Dm) but he teaches them in relation to one another (1, 4, 5, 57, 6m etc). Now that I have a teeny bit more understanding of chords in relation to each other, I can see the value of this approach since it enables you to play in any key without even knowing the name of the key it is since there are only 4 possible shape sets it could be in.

While I think that knowing the movable chords is going to be important to me in the long run, I don't think this is a book for a beginner with no music theory under their belts. If you knew what I meant when I referred to 1, 4, 5, 57, 6m chords - you can probably benefit from this book.

I often look at books to see different approaches to learning the instrument. This is a valuable resource. The goal is to get the player comfortable playing around the instrument in any key in any of the chord positions. He has the player go through standard patterns and progressions. He also illustrates the extended chord forms and shows how to convert the basic major chord positions to these chords. It is not a songbook, or book of chord boxes, but a book about learning the instrument fluently. It would be good for players who want to be able to play without being glued to chord sheets and books. There are good ideas here and it is worth checking out.

I ordered it. I think it will be just the thing for me. Thanks all

marymac said:

...but he teaches them in relation to one another (1, 4, 5, 57, 6m etc).

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Sounds like Jerry is a bass player. I've tried and tried to get our guitarists to understand why I rechart all of our music in Nashville numbering but they just get the 'ole deer in the headlights look - then go shuffling through their music trying to find the song in the right key... LOL

John

OldePhart said:

I've tried and tried to get our guitarists to understand why I rechart all of our music in Nashville numbering but they just get the 'ole deer in the headlights look...

John

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Keep up the good fight, John. We'll win 'em over one of these days!!
Bill

KamakOzzie said:

Keep up the good fight, John. We'll win 'em over one of these days!!
Bill

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Heh, heh. It's kind of funny. Bass players are the butt of so many musical jokes but I played lead guitar (badly) for years and rhythm guitar (not much better) for years - it wasn't until I started playing bass that I really began to understand music. Now, on those rare occasions when I do pick up a six string, I'm ten times better because I finally understand what I'm doing!

John