The Advancing Guitarist by Mick Goodrick: What’s Actually In It, and How to Use It

There’s a specific thing that happens with this book. Someone mentions it in a thread about improvisation. Three people reply saying it changed their playing. You buy it. It arrives — thin, no cover art to speak of, no tab, barely a hundred pages. You read the first twenty and something in there is clearly true and clearly aimed at you. Then you put it on the shelf and it stays there.

I don’t think that’s a failure of discipline. It’s the book working exactly as designed, and most people aren’t told what the design is before they start.

What it actually is

The Advancing Guitarist came out in 1987. It runs to about 115 pages and is organised into three parts: The Approach, Materials, and Commentaries. It’s written as essays rather than as a graded course. There are no lesson numbers, no progress markers, no tab, and very little in the way of “do this, then do this.”

The first section deals with fingerboard mechanics, and it starts somewhere almost no other book starts — playing up and down a single string, which Goodrick frames as the science of the unitar. From there it moves to two adjacent strings, to what he calls mini-positions, to intervals treated both melodically and harmonically, and only then to open position and conventional position playing. That ordering is the argument. Most books start with position playing because it’s where the shapes live. Goodrick puts it last on purpose.

The middle of the book covers modes, chord-scales, quartal harmony, and a lot of contemporary harmonic material. The later commentaries wander into things like overtones, the value of space, how to be self-critical about your own playing, improvising short pieces, and how different playing situations should change what you do. The tonal range is wide. It can be funny, and then two pages later it will hand you something that would take a decade to exhaust.

The critical thing, and he says so early on: this is not a method. It’s material. You are expected to build the method yourself out of what’s there. He isn’t being coy — he explicitly says that what you get out of it depends on what you’re currently able to take from it, and that this is the correct arrangement.

Why it defeats people

Three reasons, and they’re all predictable.

It withholds the part you came for. Most instructional books sell you a sequence. This one sells you a set of raw materials and tells you the sequence is your job. If you’ve spent years being handed methods, being handed material instead reads as an unfinished product. It isn’t, but it feels like one.

It doesn’t tell you where to start. The contents page looks like a list of topics, not a path. So people open it at whatever page looks interesting, get a page and a half of something dense, feel like they’ve missed a prerequisite, and close it.

The opening exercise sounds trivial and isn’t. “Play on one string” reads like a warm-up. Read past it and you’re skipping the only chapter that actually rewires anything.

Start with one string, and stay there

If you’re going to use this book, use it here first. Everything else in it will make more sense afterwards.

The exercise is what it sounds like. Put on a static backing — a single chord, a drone, one vamp — and improvise using one string. Not one string at a time within a phrase. One string, for the whole session.

What happens is worth predicting so you don’t quit at the point where it starts working.

The first two minutes are fine. You play something. Then you run out, because what you thought was improvising was largely retrieval — you were reaching for shapes your hands already knew, and on one string there are no shapes to reach for. There’s a straight line of semitones and nothing else. The silence that follows is diagnostic. It’s showing you the actual size of your vocabulary once the pattern library is taken away.

What it forces, if you stay with it, is that you start hearing something before you play it, because there’s no other way to find a note. And the fretboard becomes measurable rather than pictorial. Two frets is a whole step. Three is a minor third. Five is a fourth, seven a fifth, twelve an octave. Those are distances, not diagrams, and they’re the same distance every time, which is not true of anything you learn in a box.

A four-week way in

Goodrick declines to give you a schedule, which is the right call for the book and unhelpful if you’ve never worked this way. So here’s one. It’s mine, not his, and you should abandon it as soon as you have a better idea.

Week one — one string, no rules. Pick the G string. Ten minutes a day over a drone in one key. Use the open string. Don’t set yourself targets. The goal is only to arrive at the point where you run out of ideas and keep playing anyway.

Week two — one string, sung first. Same setup. Before each phrase, sing something short. Then find it. You’ll be slow and you’ll miss. Missing is the exercise — every miss is an interval you can’t yet identify, and now you know which ones.

Week three — two adjacent strings. This is Goodrick’s next step and it opens up more than you’d expect. Two strings gives you a range of about an octave and a half and, more importantly, gives you two lines to work against each other. Keep the horizontal habit. The temptation is to snap back into a box the moment a second string is available.

Week four — full neck, horizontal bias. Go back to everything, but hold the constraint that any phrase must cover at least five frets of ground. It’s an artificial rule and it will feel like one. It’s there to stop you settling back into a single position out of habit.

This is the week where the constraint stops doing enough on its own, because “move horizontally” isn’t much use as an instruction unless you have something to move along. That’s the gap my Horizontal Soloing System fills — one sequence that runs the modes of the major scale up and down the whole neck with no positions and no patterns to memorise, and the same logic then applied to harmonic minor, melodic minor and the pentatonics. It’s a free PDF, no sign-up. Goodrick makes the case for horizontal playing and then, in keeping with the rest of the book, leaves you to work out the mechanics. That’s the mechanics.

Record every session. Not to admire — to hear what you actually played rather than what you meant to play. Goodrick’s material on being self-critical is worth reading in week one for exactly this, and it’s the section people skip because it isn’t notes.

Who shouldn’t buy it

If you want to sound better next month, this isn’t the book, and buying it will just make you feel guilty. If you’re working on repertoire, or learning to play over changes, there are better and faster resources.

It’s for a specific person: someone who can already play, who has a suspicion that their improvising is more retrieval than invention, and who’s willing to work with no visible progress for a while. That’s a narrow description, but if it’s you, you’ll know within ten pages.

It also has a natural companion. Wayne Krantz’s An Improviser’s OS is the other book built on the premise that pattern dependency is the thing holding you back, and it takes the opposite route to the same place — Goodrick restricts the geography, Krantz restricts the note collection. Read together they cover most of the ground. Neither will tell you what to do with them, which is the point of both, and both leave you doing the same job of building a method out of raw material. I’ve written up how I actually use the Krantz book, including the part where I gave up on his suggested practice format and did something else instead — which is what he wants you to do anyway.

The thing to take away

The reason this book has lasted almost forty years without ever being an easy read is that it refuses to do the part everyone wants done for them. It hands you the material and leaves the method to you, on the grounds that a method you built is a method you’ll actually use.

That’s an inconvenient thing to be told, and it’s also correct. Start on one string. Everything else in there will wait.