Berklee Guitar Style Studies

"Buy Now" to view and securely purchase the available paperback / digital editions at our publishing partner Hal Leonard LLC.

Related Online Courses & Programs

Specialist Guitar Skills Certificate Program

If you are serious about studying guitar and taking your playing to the next level, you must possess not just a command of chords and scales but an understanding of improvisation and how to express depth and feeling. This certificate program, taught by Berklee’s world-renowned guitar faculty, enables you to develop your guitar technique and hone your skills in any style, from rock, jazz, and country to metal, blues, and beyond. Upon completion, you’ll be able to recreate parts played by your guitar heroes—but more importantly, you’ll be better able to realize your own unique sound.

Guitar Chords 101

Add more dynamics and expression to your playing and gain a greater feel for your instrument by learning Berklee's approach to the construction of chords and chord voicings.

Guitar

Become a Better Guitarist with Berklee. Develop your sound and become a more well-rounded guitarist. Learn chords and scales in any style, and advance your blues, rock, jazz, and funk technique.

Master Guitar Certificate Program

From rock to jazz or folk to metal, what separates the great guitarists from the rest is their mastery of the skills taught in this program. From basics like chords and scales to nuances like improvisation techniques, form, control, and inflexion, this certificate program will take your guitar playing to the next level. Few accomplished guitarists have reached their peak alone, and Berklee’s faculty is unparalleled when it comes to delivering the personalized instruction and feedback that will help you turn the fretboard into a playground packed with unlimited possibilities.

Learn to play rock, blues, jazz, funk, Latin, R&B, and other styles! Each of these twenty studies features the characteristic rhythms and techniques of a distinct musical style. You will expand your palette of sounds and approaches to the guitar. This will help you to become more versatile in your playing and to develop your own unique voice as a guitarist.

These tunes have been honed over decades of use in Jim’s ensembles, master classes, and private lessons at Berklee College of Music, for use in the classroom and in concert. Besides illustrating different styles of guitar playing, they are performance ready: fun to play, facilitating soloing/jamming, and with arrangements that are relatively easy for a band to pick up. They span a wide range of playing levels, from beginner to advanced.

Each study includes an introduction to the style and the specific piece, with a fully notated guitar part and a lead sheet. Accompanying audio includes performance and play-along tracks (full band and rhythm section, minus guitar). Our Online Access media tool lets you change the keys and tempos, as you practice. Ten of the studies also include video workshops, where Jim gives more detailed lessons about the featured styles and techniques, plus full performances featuring close-ups of his hands—over an hour’s worth of video instruction.

You will learn to:

Play twenty tunes in a wide variety of styles, appropriate for performance
Explore the styles and techniques of guitarists such as Jeff Beck, Mike Stern, Pat Metheny, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, and Stevie Ray Vaughan
Interpret a variety of notation approaches: traditional staff notations, guitar tablature, and lead sheet notation
Identify how different approaches to picking and strumming style, articulation, instrument, comping, and other factors help create a distinct sound and feel
Develop your own approaches and phrase your own solos by using the techniques of master guitar players

This edition combines and integrates the notation, audio, and video from three products previously released separately: Jim Kelly’s Guitar Workshop, More Guitar Workshop, and Jim Kelly’s Guitar Workshop DVD.

Jim Kelly is a professor of guitar at Berklee College of Music, where he has taught since 1974 and mentored thousands of guitarists.

“I had the pleasure of meeting and playing with Jim Kelly way back in the ’70s when I was a student at Berklee. And now, all these years later, here we both are, still at it. I feel so lucky. This is a great book. Spending time with it can broaden understanding, solve problems, open doors, and take us further down the road to finding our own voice. These are not just ‘exercises’ but music, presented clearly and in great detail. Each of these pieces reflects Jim’s lifetime of experience and love of music. There is much to learn here.”

—Bill Frisell

“One of the best ways to improve your playing is to study and emulate the techniques of great players. Jim’s book and videos do a great job of demonstrating some of these techniques in a way that will help any guitarist become a better player and improviser.”

—Gary Burton