Preparations: An Introduction to Fingerstyle Playing

by Howard Morgen

An excellent introduction to the art of solo guitar playing. Useful to anyone who wants to become familiar with the techniques and concepts of fingerstyle solo guitar while learning the rudiments of music, notation, basic theory and the guitar fingerboard.

100 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book after reading Howard Morgen's book Concepts: Arranging for Fingerstyle Guitar where he mentions Preparations: An Introduction to Fingerstyle Playing as a pre-requisite. Preparations is a good beginners book for learning to read music and find the notes on the guitar. It is like a classical guitar method with jazz as the music to be played in a classical style. The last part of the book is where it was really useful to me in terms of repertoire. The weakness of this book is that it uses a very old style of right hand technique for classical guitar. I would ignore all of Morgen's explanations on this matter and use the right hand technique of Aaron Shearer in Aaron Shearer Learning the Classic Guitar Part 1 and Aaron Shearer Learning the Classic Guitar Part 2 instead. This is why I deducted a star. However the repertoire is excellent supplementary material for students, it goes at very meticulous pace, it connects to Concepts: Arranging for Fingerstyle Guitar and it has good repertoire pieces towards the back of the book. This made it worth it for me.