Alfred's Basic Guitar Method, Book 1 Review

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(More customer reviews)Follow this Method! "Alfred's Basic Guitar Method" is a system to make you a real musician. Its' exercises, music and theory leads you naturally and comfortably to deeper levels of musicianship and enjoyment. That must be why this book has been so popular for over 50 years. It has also been updated to include more current tunes.
Want to teach yourself? This Method combines physical and mental exercises with the enjoyment of music-making as the goal:
Physically: It begins with illustrations of good guitar-playing posture, seated and standing. Also shown are correct hand and finger shapes and arm positions. The exercises are comfortably paced making learning enjoyable. You locate notes, one-at-a-time on one string-at-a-time while the hands and fingers are gradually strengthened and made flexible. Soon you will be using finger positions or "pattern shapes" on the fret board to build chords as the strings are learned. Your "mini-athlete" hand and finger muscles are gradually strengthened and flexed for stamina, agility and building "muscle memory."
Mentally: Standard music notation, dynamics (tempo, rhythm, loudness, etc.) and theory are taught in the book. These subjects are revealed and explained as you progress through the exercises. The same is true of chord-building as notes on the various strings are learned and played together. Without realizing it, music understanding and techniques are progressively learned by completing the exercises and playing the enjoyable tunes. Oh, by the way, the material is presented very clearly with lots of "white space" so it's easy to overlook very important information. Be sure to really study each page and not just the exercise before moving on. Suddenly you are reading and understanding music!
A word about chords. Many people start by learning full guitar chords by rote. To a beginner they are painful and awkward finger patterns on the fretboard, without gaining a real understanding of the note relationships. Also, many guitar books separate the teaching of standard notation from teaching chords. As you can see from what has been said above, this Method presents a more gradual and integrated system. Muscles are allowed to adapt and the mind to "see" the logic in the note arrangements.
You may also want to check out the three-books-in-one with CD of this series.

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Recognized for over 50 years as the best-paced and most comprehensive guitar method available, Alfred's Basic Guitar Method has introduced over 3 million beginners to the joy of playing guitar. This companion DVD for Book 1 with iPod-compatible video is now available for the visual learner.

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