Customer Reviews

Acoustic Guitar Primer for Beginners (Book & CD-ROM)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been fooling around with the guitar off and on for 25 years. After all that time I still consider myself a beginner. This summer I was having another "serious" go at playing when I bought Casey's book on the recommendation of a guitar shop owner. One of my problems is that I know the intro and "signature" lick of many songs, but when asked to perform for friend and family, I just didn't have a repertoire of complete songs (either standards that everyone can sing-along with or instrumentals that stand on their own). Casey's book has solved this problem, the first dozen or so pages are pretty basic, but then things get interesting. Casey has excellent (yet simple) arrangements of traditional bluegrass and country songs that make great additions to one's repertoire while also teaching playing techniques: alternating base, bass runs between chord changes, combining hammer-ons and pull-offs with strumming, etc. They are easy enough for the beginner to play while having enough fancy licks to impress non-players with your chops. The included CD has all songs at slow and performance tempos to help with learning the songs. Some of my particular favorites are "Rolling in my Sweet Baby's Arms", "Sitting on top of the World", and "Wabash Cannonball". I've been having a lot of fun with this book for the past couple of months. The information in this book is also available on Video and DVD, which I am considering buying.

Bert Casey's Guitar Primer book is excellent. This book can be used for the first year or more of your journey with guitar. The lessons are well planned and presented, easy to follow also. Very good progress can be made following the material laid out in this book. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn to play guitar well and move beyond simple chord structures. All A++++ for this book.

Bert Casey is an excellent guitar instructor. If you use this book in conjunction with the video or DVD you'll get a pretty comprehensive understanding of acoustic guitar techniques. Casey uses classic songs like "In the Pines", "Going Down that Road Feeling Bad", "Banks of the Ohio" (and more) to effectively teach you how to play. The video is great for those who would profit from visual demonstration.

There is also a follow up book that has recently become available that goes into even more depth. But this book/CD should keep you busy for a while.

I had difficulty finding guitar instructors in my area for the first 18 months of owning a guitar, so I turned to Bert Casey's 2 volume series: Acoustic Guitar Primer, and Acoustic Guitar Part 2. These are extremely well done and easy to follow, and each lesson builds nicely on the previous ones, so that by the end of Book 1 you know several chords and techniques such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, and particularly country bass runs The only drawback is that most of the material in book 1 is traditional or folk songs, which doesn't necessarily hold my interest as well as rock or blues, but this is a relatively minor criticism. I found the DVD somewhat helpful, but a bit distracting. Listening to the CDs included with the books helps focus one more on the feel of the strings and the sounds, instead of encouraging one to look at what the left hand is doing.

Well I think this is a great book for the beginning guitar player. This set will easily get you started down the road to excellence. Rock on!

This book was not a whole lot of help. Very basic, very dated, and no video. There are better beginner lessons out there.

The book is fine but I paid about a dollar more for a gauruntee of a disc when it arrived broken in half anyway.

Acoustic Guitar Primer is a good book written by Author Bert Casey.

This is a cover of an acoustic guitar?