Customer Reviews

Fingerstyle Guitar Essentials Book/CD (String Letter Publishing) (Acoustic Guitar) (Acoustic Guitar Magazine's Private Lessons)

5 star:		(1)
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If you're just learning fingerstyle guitar then this is quite a good book for you. The various teachers cover various techniques, tunings, and musical styles. The CD is very helpful (which is typical for this publisher) because every phrase, every song is played first at a slow speed, and then up to tempo.

The songs taught in the book are quite nice, I even changed my own arrangement of "If I Only Had A Brain" to incorporate several of the ideas in the arrangement in this book.

But overall, the material is a bit light. Again, if you're new to the technique of fingerstyle guitar then you'll probably enjoy it. And if you've been playing a few years it's still a fun book to just start at the beginning and work your way through. But there's not a huge amount of material here.

Still, it's a fun book. At this price it's probably worth getting just for the fun of learning everything in the book in a weekend.

This is essentially a collection of articles on playing fingerstyle guitar. The articles are divided into three categories, building technique, arranging for solo guitar, and using alternate tuning. The big problem with book is that it never goes very deep. There are twelve articles by eight authors. Each article is really an introduction to a topic on fingerstyle. Each of these topics could be a book itself and I would happily buy those books if written by those authors. I really felt like this book is a sampler of fingerstyle guitar.

I should say something about the physical quality of the book I own. The quality is terrible. It has a flat glued spine. One would think that the publisher might know that people using the book would put the book on a music stand. To keep the pages from flipping while on the stand you need to bend the pages back a bit. Doing this myself, I already have pages falling out. Why doesn't the publisher use a stapled or spiral binding?

All items from Acoustic Guitar Magazine's Private Lessons are second to none. That includes this item too. Its easy for us folks overseas to understand, and we learn to play american folkmusic and blues in a very easy and good way.