Book Review: Scales: a practical resource by Alex Rogowski

This book is probably one of the most fascinating books that I have, mainly because of how deep the content is. For avid geeky guitar explorers from the early 2000s to perhaps mid 2010s, you might have encountered many of Alex Rogowski’s notes, exercises, transcriptions and lesson material on his website, a guitarist’s notebook.

The culmination of his work is probably the two books he released, The Thesaurus of Scale Tone Chords (reviewed here) and Scales: a practical resource. The challenge of discussing his work now is that it is almost completely offline, and I haven’t been able to contact him for years now. I am honestly unaware of what happened to Alex and his website but even with that, I feel strongly that it is worth talking about this book.

This book is a massive work, in the tradition of Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus Of Scales And Melodic Patterns. It is also related to works like Mick Goodrick’s almanacs and Wayne Krantz’s The Improvisors OS. In regards of currently available works like this, I would always point people to Noel Johnston’s books. Those are the most similar in intellectual curiosity to what Alex Rogowski was doing.

Now this book itself is a cross between a theory book, a how to book and a lick/melodic resource book. Looking at it now (many years since I first acquired a copy), I realize that the appendixes are potentially little universes of melodic and harmonic curiosity of their own.

The best part of the book is that it is not prescriptive. It does not tell you WHAT to do, but more introduces you to the various sounds and sonic colors that Alex Rogowski has discovered in his own studies. This makes sense since his website was called a guitaritst’s notebook.

At 212 pages, this book has so much to offer the curious musician. Even after going back to the book off an on over the years, I still feel that I don’t really fully understand what Alex shares. There’s a lot of sounds here that I haven’t used or even tried out.

The chapters are laid out according to the general tonality that the scales outline and he gradually takes them “outside” into more uncommon or unusual sounds. So yes, you have your major pentatonic and major scale but you also have Ionian (b2) and Lydian (b2,b6) – which is not even one of the weirder one he shares. When you get to the symmetrical scales, you get his take of Messiaen’s Modes of Limited Transposition and that gets even more interesting.

In addition to the diagrams, charts, analysis, examples and his notes, accompanying the book are audio examples (MIDI playback of his musical examples using various sounds). These are invaluable since you can much easier go through the book and HEAR what these sounds are like. Some of the examples include that whole Eric Dolphy wide interval stuff, so if you don’t have enough chops, it’s nice to hear the ideas at full tempo before investing time to learning them.

All in all, this book remains one of the most curious harmonic explorations I have (in addition to Mick Goodrick’s modern classic almanacs of course). I wish I could tell you how to get a copy of the book, but as I mentioned, the website is down and I am not sure about what happened to Alex since we last emailed.

That being said, since he posted the audio examples on Bandcamp, they remain there, available for purchase, should you be curious about this book.

You can get the audio & musical examples/scores here: https://aguitaristsnotebook.bandcamp.com/music

If you have any information about Alex, please feel free to contact me as I would like to know since I am a fan of his work & am genuinely curious about his updates. Thank you.

[Related books]

If you like this book, you might like these:

Book Review: Voicing Modes – A Chord Voicing Approach to Hearing and Practicing Modes by Noel Johnston
Book Review: Modal Etudes by Noel Johnston
Book Review: The 4-Note Universe: A Systematic Exploration of 4-Note Chords & Arpeggios with Études for Guitar by Noel Johnston

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