How To Play Guitar: A Complete Guide for Absolute Beginners - Level 1

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Even if you are taking guitar classes, there are some teachers out there who don’t know how to properly explain how or why music works. The technique that comes with learning classical guitar is very different than other styles of guitar. As much as we don’t like to get weighed down with too much info right off the bat, we like that this book starts by giving you a good foundation to work with, breaking down the basics of guitars, chords, technique, and other handy info.

The accompanying audio serves as a metronome to help you develop your rhythm skills as well as demonstrating the daily exercise. This is a technique of memory learning that involves taking stories, phrases, and acronyms and using them to remember important pieces of information.For example, understanding the fretboard can help players create chords in any key, understand the relationships between different scales, and improvise more effectively. The universal standard tuning is E, A, D, G, B, E, and this is what most of the songs you’ll learn early on are in tune with. While it’s important to note that this book won’t turn you into a guitar virtuoso overnight, it provides a solid foundation for beginners to build on. Most of the songs in the book are familiar enough so that you know what they are supposed to sound like without the enclosed CD.

It covers a few genres so that you can get the specific information you want whether you’re playing the blues or going classical. Knowing the fretboard like the back of your hand unlocks freedom that many guitarists will never get to experience. Towards the end, it teaches modes and modal harmony, chord substitution, and reharmonization as well. This book is a more expansive guide to guitar for the absolute beginner than ‘Teach Yourself Guitar’, and a good read.In this book, I found detailed explanations of chords, diatonic harmonies, chord construction, melodies, and rhythms. The book follows up the practical information with the underlying music theory, so that you can go through it multiple times to deepen your understanding of how music works. The book discusses both tabs and notation which makes it easier to transition if you’ve been using the former. I found that there was stuff I "knew" that worked for me but I wasn't clear as to why it worked until I read this and worked through the exercises. Having been just released, this new edition doesn't have any reviews yet at the time of this writing.

Although the method books in this article all contain chord glossaries of different sizes, a chord encyclopedia is an essential guitar book for beginners because it helps grow your chord vocabulary. In addition to the book, students also have access to supplemental videos that provide additional instruction and demonstration. If you want me to make a video review of these guitar books as well, let me know in the comments section below. Teach Yourself Visually Guitar is both a step-by-step guide to playing acoustic or electric guitar and an accessible reference guide.No shortcuts, just that all the fluff and mindless theories have been chucked out to give a practical approach.

Learning music theory is not important for beginner guitarists, but after reaching an intermediate level, learning about music theory really helps in putting it all together.

Teach Yourself Visually Guitar stands out as a guitar book for beginners because after introducing guitar selection, tuning, and posture, it shows you three easy essential chords that work together in songs.