Solo Guitar Playing
A friend of mine has recently started learning the guitar.
He has been having difficulty finding a book. I have been through a few and would recommend Solo Guitar Playing.
I find too many books are just trying to rush you to playing something you may have heard of, rather than building foundations. This book states plainly at the beginning that it should take approximately 2 years to complete. That's right. It's not a quick and dirty solution. It takes time to learn to play any instrument. The book is designed for teaching classical guitar, but is great for acoustic guitarists. It doesn't use TAB. For those of you who don't know, TAB is short for tablature. It's a way of showing which notes to play by number only.
This is all well and good if you're trying to play something you already know, but it's harder if you don't know the piece. Why? Because you don't know how long you're supposed to play each note.
Some TAB comes with musical notation above it, so you have to look at two things to be able to play the piece properly. Silly. Also you will not be able to read any music not written specifically for guitar in TAB. You've just cut off centuries of music.
I remember listening to another friend's brother who is a Flamenco guitarist. I thought he was playing the piano. I'd like to be that good one day.
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Excellent, thanks for the recommendation. I have the finger-picking brother to this but I haven't opened it yet. I also have been frustrated with teachers who want to teach me to play songs rather than build a foundation. Looks like with this I could do it myself.
Good guitar teachers should ask you what you want to accomplish before diving in with songs. Which book do you have Alicia?
I thought it looked familiar. I do in fact have the same book. Third edition. Nice to know it's a good one. Don't I feel silly now! I do like the Guitar Grimoire books for teaching some music theory. I was trying to get my teacher to teach me finger-style and some classical. If I had looked hard enough at UNT I could have found a really good teacher. UNT is famous for its School of Music. I recommend never taking lessons from places like Guitar Center :)