Customer Reviews

A Modern Method for Guitar - Volumes 1, 2, 3 Complete

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've worked at a music store in the past and browsed many guitar books, but I've never seen one this good. Most of the books are too "friendly" and pretty similiar to one another...they may even come with CDs. If you're not very interested in learning to sight read, or just want to play around with the guitar, I suggest you check out another book.

This book is pretty "hardcore." If you're looking for a book for your child, I would highly recommend this book be used in conjunction with a teacher or someone else who can offer assistance. You may be inclinded to purchase a book that includes an audio recording, but how will you ever learn to sightread music if you have heard the songs before? (All of the songs in this book are original.)

If you are really dedicated to learn guitar this book will take you VERY far. There is very little instruction in this book however, so I'd recommend you have a little bit of music knowledge. Another reviewer claimed you needed to know how to sightread already, this is untrue, but obviously desirable. From the very beginning, this book is going to ask a lot from you, but keep on trucking and you will catch up. There IS a steep learning curve. The book is very comprehensive and leaves practically nothing out. Like I said before, the book is 400 pages, and it's got practically no fluff. You've got your work cut out for you.

Listen, your guitar is never going to learn how to play itself, and neither will playing air guitar ever get you anywhere. If you're serious, buy this book and dedicate yourself.

P.S. As others have said, the binding is glue, and holds together over 400 pages. Do yourself a favor and take your book to a KINKO'S and have the book spiral-bound for about $5.

This is a great book for any guitarist. It focuses on reading music mostly, and gets into technique later in the book. One thing to keep in mind, however, is the binding. It's a rather thick book with a ... glue binding, so it's difficult to keep open. After much use some of the pages start to come loose. I'd buy the volumes separately if I could do it again.

I used the Leavitt books when I was learning to sight read back in the late 1960s, and it's still as good today as it was back then. The typography may look a little old to eyes used to modern computerized typesetting and layout, but the material is still solid. Working through all three volumes of Leavitt will give you a comeplete mastery of the fingerboard, and you'll learn some hip chords and lines along the way.

The new binding is a nice improvment- although the text inside is unchanged. And having all three volumes of Leavitt in one binding is both a money saver and convenient, as you'll want to refer back to some of the scale and chord charts once in a while.

There have been a lot of methods published before and since, but this is still one of the absolute best.

First, let me say that this method IS NOT all about sight reading. This is an approach that does not cater to illiteracy(unlike most methods that are written in TAB so illiterate guitarists can buy it and stay in their comfort zone), so I can understand how those who don't read may feel like it is a sight reading program.

That being said I'll tell you what it is: Bill Leavitt has devised a logical, progressive way of presenting all of the techniques a guitarist needs to get well on their way to reaching their potential. If you don't read standard notation(little black dots) then you will fluently by the time you get through this program. However, this method just as thoroughly addresses every other technique you can think of. It is truly a complete method.

My greatest regret about my progress as a musician is that I wasted so much time and energy getting sucked into the notion that if Jimi Hendrix was illiterate, then that's the way I want to be. Make the decision now to broaden your horizons and develop a sense of refinement. Be a musician, not just another twit with a guitar.

If you want to get proficient, work your way through these books and you will be. Quality stuff. Not the most exciting material, but mastering an instrument tends to involve at least some tedious moments. Plus, as people have mentioned, the fact that the tunes are unfamiliar (and not particularly memorable) will really boost your reading skills.

Do yourself a favor though, and practice this with a metronome. I finished the first book before i realized i still had no rhythm, and had to go back and relearn the whole thing with a metronome to play on this level with other people. However, there's a good chance you naturally have better rhythm than me. Especially if you:

a)have a pulse
b) are breathing.

I've been looking for a long time for the right book to teach myself guitar and think this book takes the prize without question.

This book presents material only as needed. The concepts of flats, sharps, time signatures, key signatures, all the fundamentals of music are presented only as required. They will be addressed in the book but the author understands that loading the student down with all that takes a back seat to learning the basics of the fretboard first. All topics are addressed in the context of how they work on the instrument. Much practice is expected of the student. The reader needs to have strong command of the current lesson before moving on to the next as it will used in a manner such that understanding is assumed.

Using this book to learn guitar is analogous to deciding you want to build a house and then going to Home Depot and buying $50,000 worth of tools. You aren't going to learn to frame the house there but when someone says "This is how you frame a house." you are going to have all the tools you need to build the house with the experience of having used them. When you have worked very far through this book someone can say "This is a 1-6-2-5 progression in C" and you will not only know what that means but be able to play with them as well.

You have to have the right mindset to use this book but if you approach it like a class I think this may be the greatest self teaching book that exists. You can't be impatient and instead have to just accept that the book is giving you what you need when you need it and that all things will come in good time.

This series is awesome. It will take a few years to go through; probably a year or two for 1-2, and 2-3+ years (or the rest of your life) for book 3, if you do it a few hours each day.

Unfortunately, it is kind of light on the mechanical side of playing and practicing; what do you practice; useful scalar patterns for muscle memory, arpeggio sequences, pick hand mechanics, etc. In learning the guitar, I've generally had more of a problem with these kinds of issues than with theory, sight reading and the like. If you have some idea of how to practice the guitar and what is legitimate to practice, the books are very useful.

I would recommend supplementing this with the two Reading Studies for Guitar books also by Leavitt (I've played both back to front many times without "practicing" it as Leavitt requests, and it will burn into your mind sight reading in positions 1-12, as well as note identification, if nothing else), and Leavitt's classical pick style book as well.

One downside to the book is that it is a large glued paperback, and it will fall apart, and is generally hard to hold open unless you pull the pages apart (which will happen naturally on their own). I still refer to book 3 every now and then, and wish I had it in single volume form for this reason.

This book is the BEST book for learning the instrument called guitar. remember back in your schoolin' days when every band nerd had a specific book that taught them everything about their instrument? if you were a bassist it's Franz Simandl. Well if you're a guitarist, its Modern Method by William G. Leavitt. It takes you from the entry level of total beginner, assumes you know little if any music theory. The book isn't difficult, learning any instrument is difficult. Expect to put time and effort in, honestly you need to spend half an hour with it everyday. I also would reccommend this to anyone who has taught themselves guitar or only knows tabulature.

At first I wondered why all private instructors use this book. Now I know why. It may not be the most joyful and easy one but surely most effective one and the best part is now they published the 3 volumes in one at a price of two. Well the exact word for the whole review is woaw.

Having been a classically-trained violinist and a professionally-trained drummer, I'd been looking for a guitar method equivalent in effectiveness to the hard-core methods almost universally found in orchestral and concert-band music but rarely found in "pop" instruments such as guitar, bass guitar, and drums.

This is it! This method is complete, comprehensive, and the most efficient way to become a virtuoso guitarist starting from scratch. You WILL be a sight-reader capable of reading several bars ahead of where you are actually playing if you truly follow this method. You WILL have your visual, auditory, and kinesthetic faculties tied firmly together: see the note (visual), hear the note in your mind (auditory digital), play the note (kinesthetic), and hear the note out loud (auditory tonal)--all instantaneously.

But the key is that you must follow this method as it is meant to be followed, and that is very, very difficult to do for a beginner. First of all, consider private instruction a requirement to use this text. Most people wouldn't expect to be able to pick up a textbook on a foreign language and work their way through it without instruction--the same goes for this text. Yes, you can start it as a beginner, but no, you cannot start it without help. Choose an instructor who shows you proper technique, especially using the most efficient movements possible so that over time, you can play prestissimo with ease and do not develop bad habits or repetitive stress disorders.

Second, your instructor must also be a coach, someone who encourages you to stick to guitar even through the "boring" first few months of learning to read and sight-read guitar music. If we all learned this stuff at the same time we were learning our ABCs, then we wouldn't be so easily discouraged when we encounter it. The problem is, most people have already learned to take reading and writing their native language for granted by the time they attempt to learn music, and it ends up being just as demoralizing as learning a second language from the ground up. Hence, people turn to more encouraging guitar methods that trade stronger sight reading for faster results.

There are several reviews that attack this as not being a beginner text. It *is* a beginner text, just not for beginners who want rapid or instant gratification or who want to be self-taught or who expect a guitar method to include general music theory*. In other words, this is for beginners who are willing to spend the money for professional instruction and put in the practice time to eventually become virtuoso guitarists. Years later, a guitarist who put in the time in the Berklee method will have an inherent and unsurmountable advantage over other guitarists; this means more recording sessions, more gigs, easier songwriting, etc. I've met such guitarists--they are the ones the producers call time and time again for their breadth and depth of knowledge.

Do yourself a favor and avoid taking shortcuts. You might feel better using some other method, but this method will make you play better.

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* Your professional instruction will almost certainly require that you purchase the Master Theory books to learn general music theory, including how to read notation, in tandem with your learning this or any guitar method. If not, perhaps you should consider another instructor or at least ask why you aren't being taught general music theory.