This is Troy Stetina's serious lead guitar book , with a neat and systematic approach to developing technique to awesome levels .

The book is worth its weight in gold if like me you've experienced frustration when seeing someone zip up and down the fretboard or let loose a blazing riff / solo and wondered how they got there .

This book is AWESOME like all of Troy's output - but its only for the serious - to do full justice to the book and to really benefit from it we're talking a serious dedicated daily practise regime

Troy seems to be uniquely qualified to teach you how to pick fast(ie:extensive study of Blackmore & Rhoads) and this book delivers exactly what it states on the cover. He knows how to do it and more importantly he knows how to convey to you how to do it. 'Flight of the Bumblebee' was recorded in the neighborhood of a quater note equals 120 bpm in 2/4 time and it's all 16th notes,(except for the 3 note 32nd note rake in measure 104), so it's fast ! Troy has made a difficult piece of classical music accessible to the average guitarist. If you want to play faster and cleaner, you've happened upon a proven winner here. The only negatives to me are minor but if you are going to describe riffs as modal(mixolydian,phrygian, etc,), you should include a brief primer on modes. He probably didn't want to get too bogged down in theoretical discussions. [Sidebar] His little scale primer book is pretty good too. It has alot of relevant info crammed into a short space. Even better would be a large spiral bound book with nice big diagrams for each mode of each commonly used scale in each key so you could spend an honest half hour to hour per day cycling each one. But having said that, the positives far outweigh the negatives. As far as the CD is concerned, many exercises can be on a single track, which is again incovenient but only minorly so(you can pause or fast forward). This is a book mostly about technique but he also wants to impart an aesthetic element which I applaud. It really humanizes the book ! I found it worth the price.

This book is somewhat lame. He doesn't really teach you much. All he really teaches you is how to hammer on and pull off fast. I thought he was going to teach how to transistion or something. Plus the CD is too damn fast. He tells you too follow along and he's already 5 tracks ahead of you, so it gets pretty damn annoying having to sit there a rewind the damn CD every 10 seconds. I wouldn't recommend wasting your money on this one.