Customer Reviews

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Acoustic Guitar Songs

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The guitar was not my first instrument and I had been reading music for over 40 years when I picked it up, so that explains the difference between the first rater's comments and my own.

After two weeks of playing the guitar, I was wanting more than I was learning by ear and from random acquaintances, and this book (along with iplaymusic's how-to guitar lessons with CD) filled my need. The music is, however, more from my era (born in mid-1950's), and younger musicians would do better to download some chords and tabs from any of the free music sites on-line.

This book is more useful than just chords in that it offers fingering advice, rhythmic specifics (the hardest advice to find, in my experience, in learning the guitar), and all in standard musical notations.

I've two years of university music theory/comp, and from that knowledge base, I applaud the music theory sections. I believe that they would help a novice, picking up guitar as the first instrument, to understand what is going on with harmonic progressions in pop songs.

Some of these songs are beyond my ability, still (the acoustical Layla, for instance, or some of the more complex fingerpicked songs), but at least one, Horse with No Name, should be playable within hours of getting the book.

Ideally, you'd have a CD or MP3 files of these songs, as recorded by the original artists, to begin to link staff and TAB notation to the sorts of sounds we're familiar with.

The introductions concerning musicianship and the recording artists themselves are really quite interesting.

If you are really a beginner, don't let the title of this book fool you, it is not for you. I bought this book about 3-4 months after I started learning the guitar, but couldn't get much out of it at all. The "lessons" at the beginning of each song should not be called lessons at all. More like a couple of pointers that do little to help a beginner figure out how to play the song. The chords are there, but there is nothing to help a beginner figure out the rhythm and the strumming patterns. I'm only now just starting to get some use out of it, now that I have almost a year of playing under my belt, but many of the songs are still a struggle.

As someone who is new to playing the guitar I found most of the songs to advanced for me to play, I have been taking lessons for 7 months.