Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself The Guitar (Teach Yourself (McGraw-Hill))

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What I liked about this book: the detailed instructions on how to place the hands, which are lacking in most of the guitar instruction books I've owned and read. Chord instruction is good, the exercises are meaningful and thankfully simple. The author was nice enough to try to teach the reader how to read the music in the exercises before going on to the real lessons. This is smart and not often seen.

However, I didn't care for the unnatural position of the left hand: keeping my hand in an L-shaped position so it could be parallel to the fretboard left my hand tired and I felt like it was an exercise in carpal tunnel syndrome to match my long fingers to the pictures in the book.

Also, some of the text is confusing. When it talks about the sliding technique, it shows how to slide from the second to the seventh fret and then talks about playing the high notes on the twelfth without telling the reader how to get there! Finally, you have eye-glazing music theory to help with reading skills, which can be problematic if music reading is still in the rudimentary stage.

Still, there is a lot the beginner can get out of this book. My own guitar is a solid-body electric, not a Spanish one as pictured, yet, outside of the difficult left-hand technique, I was able to apply most of the lessons. And the exercises are great for warming up. Maybe the next edition of this book will clear up the confusion.

This book is an introduction to classical guitar, originally written for British readers in the 1960s. It covers such topics as parts of the guitar, how to hold the instrument, how to change a string, tuning, basic right and left hand techniques for classical guitar, basic music theory, advanced classical guitar techniques, and suggestions for practicing. There is also a short overview of the history of the instrument and a brief discussion of the standard classical guitar repertoire. At the end of the book is a 3-page glossary of terms commonly found in music for classical guitar.

While the author suggests that certain chapters may be useful for beginners in all styles, this seems a bit overstated. The information on tuning is perhaps the most generalizable, although the ubiquitous electronic tuners these days have made it less necessary to master the proper use of a tuning fork. Still the description in this book of at least getting the relative tuning of the strings consistent is quite clear, and it is a topic that is not often discussed in other books for beginners. Fradd discusses how to read music, and how to play scales and arpeggios, but since this is a book about classical guitar, he does not introduce how to play chords or popular songs.

Fradd comes across as being very chauvinistic about the merits of classical guitar versus any other style of guitar playing. In many places, he writes almost as if other styles didn't exist or weren't worthy of study (thus the title "Teach Yourself Guitar", instead of a more precise alternative like "Teach Yourself Classical Guitar".) Nevertheless, his prose is very clear, and the sections on musical theory are exceptionally good. There isn't a lot of room in a short book like this one for exercises, so this book is definitely not a method book. In place of exercises, Fradd includes suggestions at the end of each chapter for pieces of music or method books that might provide appropriate study material. Thus, you won't be able to learn to play even classical guitar with this book alone, but you may learn some interesting facts and get some hints of directions to follow if you would like to take up the classical guitar in earnest.