Product Description

Since its first printing in 1968, Frederick Noad's Solo Guitar Playing has been used by countless students and teachers of classical guitar. The fourth edition features revised and updated exercises and an expanded selection of solo guitar repertoire gleaned from the best-selling Frederick Noad Guitar Anthology.

This is the well anticipated FOURTH Edition of this book!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25668 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-31
• Released on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 254 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780825636790
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Guitarist, lutenist, author and teacher, Frederick Noad grew up in England. Originally trained on the violin and piano he took up the guitar in his early teens.
After graduating from Oxford he came to California in 1957 to organize a story department for the J. Arthur Rank Organization in Hollywood. When the film company suffered some setbacks and had to curtail its U.S. plans Noad decided to stay on. Soon after he was offered a job playing the guitar, which had become a favourite avocation, and he began to teach and to write for the instrument as well.
Thus began a long and happy (if unexpected) musical career. At this time he studied composition with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco at the latter's home in Beverly Hills and attended master classes of Andres Segovia and Julian Bream as a performer. Noad's first book, "Playing The Guitar" became a paperback best seller in the sixties, and this success lead to a succession of further instruction books and anthologies (listed below).
In 1966 Noad launched the award winning TV series "Guitar with Frederick Noad" for PBS The programs were enthusiastically received from coast to coast, and were credited with introducing 100,000 new players to the instrument. The currently running educational television.series is a colour remake of the original with the benefit of the latest electronic techniques .
Noad has been a faculty member of the University of California, Irvine, and the California Institute of the Arts. He has performed as a soloist, as part of a duet team, in concert with a lyric tenor and also as a continuo player in early opera. In addition to the guitar he plays the lute and theorbo.

Customer Reviews

Good Follow-Up
Dear Consumers,

I usually don't place reviews, but I found that those who did usually had good accessments of the material contained here. As you probably well know, this book is the continuation of classical guitar studies by Frederick Noad. It offers more etudes of the great "classical"-time period masters, such as Fernando Sor, Matteo Carcassi, and Mauro Guiliani. In addition, some Tarrega pieces(particularly the tremelo study, "Recuerdos de la Alahambra" are a delight as well. Finally, the elaboration on ornaments(continued from the first book) is an invaluable lesson. And especially for teachers, these two books by Frederick Noad is a must.

Great classical guitar book
First let me say that I would not recommend this book unless you are at least an intermediate classical player, if not, then begin with Noad's "Solo Guitar Playing 1", which goes from beginner to intermediate. Both of these books come with a cd containing most of the songs from the book, and neither one has tab. Solo guitar 2 has some technical instruction, such as counting dotted notes, rest stroke and free stroke, slurs, trills and other ornaments, and a number of definitions of classical music terminology. This book covers the periods known as classical, romantic, renaissance and baroque, with exercises and songs from each, by masters such as Sor, Tarrega, Guiliani (including his exercises for the right hand), Bach, Handel and others. The material goes from fairly easy examples that will improve your speed, accuracy and sight reading ability, to "Recuerdos de La Alhambra" and "Estudio Brillante de Alard", which are advanced concert quality pieces by F. Tarrega. There is also a song by Frederic Hand called "Study number 1", which isn't exactly classical, but it is quite nice anyway. This is one of my favorite classical guitar books, the material was selected to be educational and very enjoyable as well. If you put in several months (years ?) of work on this book you will not regret it, and by the end, you will be able to play these great songs, and just about anything else that you could ever imagine.

I love this book.
Do get this book if you are going to try or are trying to learn how to play the guitar by yourself. The difficulty of exercises progresses slowly and with complete explanations before going on to more challenging material. Actual pieces of music are very pretty and fun to play, and footnoted at parts where the reader may encounter trouble. Of course, it does help a lot if you have prior experience in reading music. One of the things I like most about this book is that it does not have songs like "Old McDonald" and such. =) It starts solely with plain exercises, and then only when the reader is ready to play actual music does Noad integrate them into the lessons. The only problem I have with this book, which doesn't mean the book is in any way defective, is that it doesn't explain and teach chords very well, so playing music other than classical may be difficult if you learn guitar from this book only. But I think it's a great book anyway.