Pat Metheny Guitar Etudes: Warm-Up Exercises for Guitar

Most guitar method books about famous players are written by someone else. This one is Pat’s own: warm-up exercises he wrote for himself, published in 2011 with tablature. It’s the closest thing in print to watching how he gets his hands ready to play.

It’s also a little ironic, in a good way. In a 2022 DownBeat interview, quoted in this site’s journal, Pat said, “I don’t necessarily think of myself as a guitar player.” That’s a useful frame for a book of warm-ups by Pat. These are exercises chosen by a musician who treats the guitar as a means to an end, and they’re worth reading that way, as a window into what he considers worth practicing every day.

This book is aimed squarely at guitarists, from serious students to working players who want a daily routine with more musical content than scales and arpeggios. It’s honest to say that this site’s author isn’t a guitarist. As the open thank-you letter says, the connection here is through composition. Even so, anyone curious about how Pat’s lines come together can learn something from the material he chose to drill.

For the musical context, pair it with the Songbook or one of the transcription folios in Transcriptions and scores.