Background
I bought this book after spending a few months going through Joe Satriani's "Guitar Secrets" book (which was AMAZING).

The Book
I'm not a huge fan of John Petrucci, but I do like the band Dream Theater, and John does some amazing work, so I thought I'd pick up this book and see what I could learn from him.

As with Joe Satriani's book, this is really not for beginners. You really need a good understanding of basic music theory and how it applies to guitar to comprehend everything that is being talked about.

The one thing I liked about this book over Joe's was, this one came with an audio CD so the examples could be heard (correctly).

This book is comprised of 8 chapters as follows:

(1) Introduction
(2) Warming Up
(3) Expanding Your Technique
(4) Expanding Your Vocabulary
(5) Expanding Your Creativity
(6) Putting It All Together
(7) Expanding Your Chord Knowledge
(8) Studying Non-Guitar Music

Before we begin, let me also say that, John is a big-time user of the chromatic scale. I personally, have not found a lot of good uses for the chromatic scale. Maybe that says something about my ability level... I do know that with judicious use of that scale, any note can either "Be" the right note or resolve to the right note, if you know what you're doing.

We start out with some basic chromatic warm up exercises. With each exercise attempts are made to make it "more musical" as opposed to just simply an exercise.

The topics of Intervallic slides, string skipping (tough to do), diatonic arpeggios, sweep arpeggios, and open strings are covered in Chapter 3.

John is a big fan of the Dorian mode and chapter 4 deals a lot with that. He also talks about navigating out side of the tonal center. I learned the most amazing thing... Basically all you have to do is solo using the Lydian scale based on the root note of the non-diatonic chord in that progression. To me, that alone was worth the price of the book because I never would have thought of that.

In chapter 5, the subject of creating original licks and spicing up your blues playing is covered. Once again, this is primarily accomplished through chromatic passing tones applied to the stock scales.

Chapter 6 is essentially tab from 3 Dream Theater songs where John illustrates some of the techniques he's been teaching in previous chapters. To me, this was the least useful section in the book. The transcriptions are fine, but I'm just not that big into learning someone elses songs.

The chord information provided in Chapter 7 is very similar to what Joe wrote in his book. There were a couple of new extended chord shapes that span like 5 or 6 frets. They are very difficult to hold.

In the final chapter on non-guitar music, we are supplied with chromatic warm up exercises based on the violin. These are pretty good too.

Conclusion
This book is pretty good, but I believe "Joe Satriani's Guitar Secrets" is more useful to the average musician. As I've stated, John uses the chromatic scale A LOT, but to me at this point, I feel it's just good warm up material, as well as LH RH synchronization stuff.

If you are stuck in a rut, this book is worth a look though, simply due to the fact that I'm sure you've probably never tried to play in this manner before.

Recommended: Yes