Play Guitar: A Practical Guide to Playing Rock, Folk, and Classical Guitar

by Nick Powlesland (Editor)

SOLD BY LITTLE GUY BOOKS.

Genres: Music

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Scarlet Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't played around much with learning guitar from books, and this is one of the few I've tried and I love it.

Pros - Jumps right in to fun, familiar songs, notations are fairly easily explained and gradually change to more standard notations as you progress through the book and learn terms etc. Difficulty increases at a reasonable pace. Songs are evenly mixed so no matter your palette, you probably won't get bored. Songs are broken down into easy-to-practice segments, with helpful notes and tips along the way and build your skill and understanding towards putting things together in a very manageable, confidence-building way.
I'm a total beginner and am having tremendous fun playing all these songs poorly, knowing I'm slowly gaining the tools to play them better.

Cons -
A few very minor frustrations... The sessions have not always been edited together extremely carefully... It's as if they came out as separate pamphlets, like an old-fashioned correspondence course format, and someone put them all together in a nice hardcover, but not always marrying things up as seamlessly as if it was written and edited as a singular book. It's not bad by any means, but there's a few details that I go, "Hey, what? Wait, when was that discussed? What does that marking mean? Did I miss a lesson?" Nothing I can't figure out from context or Google, though.
Another con, though not actually a con, maybe more of a comment... the songs are broken up into learnable segments... you might learn a beat, then chord changes, then they'll put together the whole intro, then the same for the verses, chorus, bridge, solo etc, whatever is in the song... all with helpful hints every step of the way... but it's not always clear how to knit all that together into a full performance of that song. It gives you the tools to recreate the song if you already know what it sounds like, but it never gives you a whole-song notation. I don't find that particularly troublesome, especially because I'm not using this as a resource to prepare for a performance or recital of any of these songs, and I really do like how it's organized, but things aren't always labeled well enough to figure out what part of the song they are meant to be without a close listening to a recording (also easily Googleable.)
If there is a 'most frustrating part' it would be that there are three sessions that teach you songs that they don't tell you what songs they are, so I can't look it up to get a feel for how the song should sound, how fast it should be played, etc. They feel vaguely familiar, but not enough for me to pinpoint title and artist. This seems like an editing oversight, but since it's only two or three sessions out of 39, it's not a terrible inconvenience.
Other than that, overall it seems mostly edited together nicely.

Oh, just one more comment, not a complaint. This book teaches how to play guitar (yeah, thats in the title). What id doesn’t do, is teach you to sight-read traditional musical notation. Its written in guitar tab format, which is way easier. But Ill need to find a different resource to learn that.

I'm honestly thrilled with my purchase and am having a blast playing through this book and plan to play through it a second time as soon as I'm done with the first round. This will likely stay on my shelf as a beginner guitar bible for years to come.
Oh, and it's a very pretty hardcover, toboot.

[Maya Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Covers a lot of topics with good tips. I still refer to it occasionally.