I thought this might make for an engaging post.

I've collected a lot of music books over the years and am certainly no expert on all the different genres and techniques but I do appreciate all kinds of styles and music and will always be willing to learn a few things or "take a page from ____'s book."

I'll go first..."Pat Metheny Guitar Etudes - Warmup Exercises for Guitar" and was pleasantly surprised.  There's a lot of great phrasing up and down the neck, you can play it with a pick or with your fingers.  The notes melody sound good and the rhythm is steady so as you get familiar with it you can speed it up.  Gives some good insight into a great player.  For me it kind of gave me something new to practice without having to think too much and I think the muscle memory of playing some of these will take me out of a rut of playing similar phrases.

Sometimes the novelty of a new book wears off and I don't always get out of it what I intended, this book I like.

Anyone else?

A music book I really like is Leo Brouwer's Simple Etudes. Never a big Brouwer fan when I was young, I became interested in these little studies after listening to Lindsay Straw perform some of them on YouTube. They are for fingerstyle guitar. I like their shortness that is tied with a specific technical issue. The 20 studies have much commentary on each study including recommendations as to tempo and other things by Frederic Zigante and Brouwer himself. They are published by ESCHIG and edited by Frederic Zigante. The book includes a CD of the 20 studies. While Lindsay Straw said she would record all of them, she appears to have stopped at #9. I see her point. The first 9 include the most important issues of the 20 studies. The others appear to incorporations of the first 9 studies. And who wants to spend their whole life playing studies LOL?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiuyv7TlNu4

Fretboard Logic vol 1 and 2 (combined) has always been a popular one.  I can vouch for the first 3 pages, but I never progressed past that.   :bgrin: