Product Description

From Scott Tennant—the best-selling author of Pumping Nylon—this fun and friendly method starts at the very beginning, teaching the anatomy of a guitar, how to choose and maintain your instrument, proper seating position, how to hold the guitar, and efficient hand positions and techniques. The step-by-step approach continues with lessons on how to read music, right- and left-hand basics, notes on the fretboard, accidentals and the chromatic scale. Photographs, drawings and personal tips from this world-renowned performer make learning easy!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #493753 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 48 pages

Customer Reviews

For my dad
Being a classical musician myself and watching my dad practice with this book was really great. The dvd is very helpful and the way that the book teaches to read music is very cohesive. The only problem is that it moves kind of fast. However, I do believe this is a good book.

Fun but over all too soon...
For those of us who are attempting to self-teach classical guitar, I think a DVD is invaluable at the early stages. This is when you are working on the basics of hand position, posture, sitting position etc... If you go wrong here, you could potentially develop bad habits which are much harder to correct later on. From this DVD, you can actually see Scott Tennant demonstrating the right way to play - which is more useful than using static photos or hand sketches you traditionally find in guitar books.

Also, it's great to be able to play duets with the on-screen Scott (once again for those of us who don't have a teacher or anyone else who can play duets with us).

The book itself is fun. The pieces include some memorable tunes. The difficulty level is for the most part reasonable for a beginner like me. The main problem is that the book is quite sparse. I finished all the pieces within a week, and it's not that much fun just repeating pieces over and over again (though maybe that's what you're really supposed to do). And though I have Basic Classical Guitar Method 2, I actually didn't feel proficient enough having gone through book 1 to move straight into book 2.

As a way of filling in the gap, I bought and am currently working through "Solo Guitar Playing" by Fredrick Noad, and it is a MUCH thicker book. Noad himself claims in the introduction that there is enough material here for 2 years of study! Now I like the sound of it, but it doesn't mean that Classical Guitar for Beginners was not satisfying or useful - just that it didn't have enough meat on the bone.

Also, the DVD version doesn't show Scort playing every single piece in the book. In that way, the CD version is superior. It's useful to be able to hear a piece being played right first so you know when and where you are stuffing it up.

classical guitar
As someone completely new to guitar, I am finding this book to be very easy to follow and very informative.