Alfred's Basic Guitar Method, Complete

by Morton Manus and Alfred D'Auberge

This book combines all of the essential instructional material from Books 1, 2 and 3 of Alfred's Basic Guitar Method and is a complete course. Written in standard notation, it guides you through the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0739024280
• ISBN13: 9780739024287
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Alfred Music
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

This method works for me.

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 fun of music-making as the goal: Physically: It starts 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 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. There is a payoff! Building chords from notes as they are being learned enables you to play fully accompanied tunes on the guitar. This is the full sound one hears on a piano, also a self-accompanying instrument. Take this musical journey and have fun!

Great Guitar Instruction!

This book is great! It takes you from zero to real guitar hero by the end of the book. You get all the books in the series in one complete volume. It comes with 3 CDs so that you can listen to a pro on your own time. This book is excellent with or without a teacher. Highly recommended.

Definitely not a waste of money

I've played guitar for years, and my son just started getting interested. I bought this book for him, and if there is any doubts, that this book is worth it. Put them aside! He's only 14 yrs old, and never picked up a guitar before in his life. Shows you the notes, the location on the frets, chords, the list is endless. After a week of going through the steps, he can now play full songs, and that was only practicing about a half hour a night! Definitely worth every penny!

Good learning source

I recommend this book for anyone learning guitar on your own. It moves along fast enough to keep you interested and has enough "real" songs to make it fun. I finished it and my son is going through it now and it works if you can read music (like me) or can't (like my son), though he had a little trouble with tabs vs. staff music until I sat down with him and explained it. My only problem with the book is the perfect binding. By the time I got to the middle of the book, the binding had broken down and pages started falling out, so I'll probably have to take the three-hole punch to it and put it in a binder. Other than that, I can't complain.