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Hello to old and new friends,
In 2005 in a Fingerstyle Guitar Forum, a guitarist started a thread asking for help learning chords beyond the open position and soloing. That cultivated my idea to create a website that was based on Mickey Baker's famous Volume 1. In his foreword, Mickey told aspiring students to get a music manuscript notebook and write out each lesson. The premise of the website would be to share my Mickey Baker notes. Using TablEdit as the musical notation editor I began to write out each lesson in all of the suggested keys. For each lesson I added additional notes attempting to explain in depth what Mickey didn't, due to the 64-page limitation placed by his original publisher. When I finished in late 2007, I created a mailing list and began sending out the lessons, one per week, to guitarists that that had signed up. After about three weeks of mailing, the president of the Texas Fingerstyle Guitar Association offered a free website. After the end of this president's term, he continued to own and manage the website until his death in 2014. I then moved the site to a location that I subscribed.
During the 10 years I've been publicly involved with the site, Mickey Baker, I added four appendices, one of which contained the exercises of Mickey's Volume 2. My goal was to give my experiences with adapting Mickey's concept for fingerstyle guitarists, while not ignoring the original plectrum techniques. The site has been completely noncommercial with the only "requirements" being to buy Mickey's volume 1 and to purchase a registration to TablEdit. And a freeware version, TEFview was given as an alternative to purchasing TablEdit. I gave detailed setup for TablEdit in the lessons' notes. I must stress that TablEdit gives the course new life, not only as a notation editor, but provides MIDI playback for the student before he ever attempts an exercise.
The site never really generated any interest by the original fingerstyle guitar forum. A friend suggested that I post in Dirk's Jazz Guitar Forum. I did so, and the site started to generate the interest I'd hoped it might. I received several hundred emails from new students and their enthusiasm was a stimulus to continue with the site.
The only criticism I ever received of the site was that it was very bland. Bland was a goal of mine, to help get the guitarist off of the computer and on to his guitar.
I have noted several interesting observations. Self teaching takes a great deal of discipline. The desire to "cherry pick" or select the lessons that were more interesting or pleasing is a luring trap. A very high percentage of the students dropped out at Lesson 16. In Lesson 17, Mickey asks the student to take a few favorite standards and reharmonize them using his chord substitution philosophy. I asked the students to send me their arrangements and I would include them with the ones I did on the site. As of today, no one ever sent me any. I also have yet to receive any news of a student actually completing the Volume 1 course.
On May 26, 2017, the Advanced Guitar Study Group website will cease to exist. I haven't decided as of yet if I might archive the site's contents on Dropbox. I want to thank all that have visited the site, and have offered their ideas, including finding "gotcha's". Creating this site has been the single greatest musical activity of my almost 60 years of fumbling around on a guitar. As I ended every lesson's notes, don't forget that learning is fun. I hope we all continue to have fun with the guitar.
Best regards to all,
Mike
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05-11-2017 01:45 PM
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Thank you for your generosity and dedication! That was a valuable site, often mentioned here (-once we found out about it).
Best to you in all you do.
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All the best to you for providing such a valuable resource.
Are there no options to sell the site, or donate it to some other source/provider ? (sorry, I'm not clued up on web jargon).
It's an awful lot of work to have to step away from.
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Hi Mike,
I found your site indispensable as I worked through the Mickey Baker material. I'm hopeful that you can find a way to preserve the material (and all of your hard work). Perhaps there is a way to preserve it here at jazzguitar.be?
In any event, thank you for your work.
Regards,
JoeLast edited by losaltosjoe; 05-13-2017 at 02:06 PM.
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Thank you, Michael Joyce. Hope that your materials will be archived somewhere. A lot of effort went into it and it is a precious resource that made sense of Mickey's book.
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In the past I have tried several times to access the TEF files but the yonly show a table of undecipherable "hieroglyphs" - and yes, I do have TablEdit......
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Hi Mike,
Thanks for all your hard work and commitment. I'm sorry to see the site go. I love Baker Volume I and have always read and worked through your notes for each lesson (although TabEdit always felt cumbersome and inelegant on my Mac.) But your notes are great.
Best,
Kirk
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Forgive my loftiness, but I had 3 hours sleep last night since my daughter isn't well.
I'm new to jazz guitar and I've not tackled the Baker method yet. I love the idea that I can, at any point, draw upon the collective wisdom of not only whoever is studying a given text at a given moment, but also draw on the cumulative experience of the community and of the world.
If you provide your archive I'll definitely snatch it up and I may add to it, and so may my daughter, and so on for the rest of 'future history'.
I'd love to provide humanity with a legacy like you have done. Please can I get a copy?
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I'm one of the ones who started & didn't finish....
that said I got some useful help from the site - it's a great resource & it would be a shame to just lose it..Thank you in any case,
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thank you Mike for your hard work and dedication to a very important teaching method to many guitar and jazz players. I discovered the Baker book in the early 70's..It was me and the book..at the time I was living in a very small town and isolated from anyone who played jazz guitar..later when I moved to los angeles I found two guitarists who played jazz and also studied the Baker book..I did ALL the lessons and wrote them out in every key and yes it is a very good book to build the basics of jazz guitar..if the instructions are followed it will be a two year course..and I followed up on it with learning theory and some harmony studies..little did I know it would prepare me to understand many of the concepts Ted Greene would show me in the two years I spent with him..and still going over some of the many lessons he gave me.
For those who are new to Baker..yes its not exciting..its basic boot camp for jazz guitar..all I can say is the good stuff comes later..when you look back on those lessons and realize how far they have taken you..so I encourage you to do the lessons as required in all keys..and write them out..that aspect of the lessons helps immensely..and learning in all keys unlocks the fretboard and how chords feel and sound in different keys and positions
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I really want to thank you for your work on the site, hope it finds a new home somewhere!
Does anybody think that someone should offer a copy of the book with tab?
It might get more modern guitarists to complete the text.
I had to try to translate everything into tab before I could try it (same with the Van Eps book.)
Good Luck!
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JPP, tab is for rockers and folkies, jazz guitar is a serious pursuit. Just sayin'.
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Originally Posted by Michael_Joyce
Best regards,
Richard
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Originally Posted by ronjazz
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I have done Part 1 of Book 1 all by hand and I've spent an entire year on it. I was thrilled to find your site. You comment on so many things I found myself and add so much more as well. I have lots and lots of contributions for Part 1. I took MB's advice and worked out dozens of ideas on every chord progression and arpeggio that interested me. I also worked out every lesson in every key whether the voicings fit or not - I would simply re-map the chords starting with the triads.
I'd love to send you all the material as you invite students to do. I downloaded the TabEdit software also and started plugging in all my hand written material into TEF files.
Any chance you could put the site back up? If not, any chance you could send me the whole site to download - Books 1 & 2? I only downloaded a few lessons of Book 1 Part 1 to have them local - I was otherwise working on-line.
Look forward to hearing from you soon.
--BillLast edited by mccaheyw; 06-06-2017 at 11:39 PM.
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I would just like to say that I enjoyed using this site as I studied the Mickey Baker course and enjoyed reading the notes for each lesson. Helped me out a few times when I was slightly confused or not sure exactly what I was doing as well. So cheers! Shame it's gone.
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Thank you for the kind words and thoughts. Since posting this thread I have received a large number of emails. I purposely built the original website to be low key, but apparently it was so low key that I had no idea of the popularity! Since shutting down the site, I have been working with another guitarist, and shortly, that is to say, after working out the bugs, all the notes and exercises for Mickey's classic course will once again be available. I promise to post that news on the Forum at the earliest opportunity. i hope that is welcome news for all.
Thanks again,
Mike
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Thanks so much for doing this! I just started using the book recently, and was able to get a few of your lessons through the Internet Wayback Machine (Internet Archive: Wayback Machine). Unfortunately they only archive the html though, so having a full site back online will be significantly better. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help, and looking forward to seeing it back online soon!
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Originally Posted by Michael_Joyce
That is great news indeed! Thanks for doing that - much appreciated!
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I am rrrreally looking forward to the new site
Thanks to 'greent' I found the site on the Internet Wayback Machine. But the images and tef files are missing.
So I am another low key fan of the upcoming new low key Mickey Baker Method website. Checking this page every day
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Did anyone use Mickey Bakers second book? I moved onto Ted Green after the first one and have not yet checked it out, apart from having a quick look at the first couple of pages on Amazon.
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Hi guys,
Thanks for the continued support. The renovation of the Advanced Guitar Study Group is continuing and shortly there will be news of where to go. One problem that had developed for users of the Firefox browser caused the download of individual lesson exercises to be displayed as garbage has been fixed. Since most students opted for downloading the zipped archive for each lesson with all the TEF's and notes, I had ignored this problem, as it really was a Firefox problem and not due to the website nor to the TablEdit files. No one ever wrote me directly about this problem so I assume it had little impact on lessons.
Notes and exercises for Mickey's Volume 2 were added to the original website as Appendix VI. My personal opinion of Volume 2 is that it was hurriedly prepared, I'm guessing, due to the success of Volume 1 and pressure from the original publisher. If the present publisher wished to do so, the 2 volumes could be combined into 1 large volume with 3 sections: Rhythm, single note soloing, and chordal soloing. There were many more typographical errors in Volume 2 than in Volume 1 and in my notes I attempted to correct them, as I did the few found in Volume 1. The 6 appendices will be included in the new website.
Please be patient and I promise your patience will pay off!
Best regards,
Mike
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Originally Posted by Michael_Joyce
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Thanks Mike!
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im interested in Mickeys Heads and solos...anything around ...i dont have the books
Getting hung up on rhythms when transcribing
Today, 11:59 AM in Ear Training, Transcribing & Reading