Solo Guitar Playing: Book 1, Fourth Edition - Learn How to Play Guitar by Yourself!

ari: I like a lot of the exercises. Also the songs for guitar ensemble are great.

United States on Jul 16, 2023

Meg C McGoldrick: My daughter who is 11-years old just started playing the guitar. This book has helped

United States on Jul 03, 2023

Priscilla: I'm a raw beginner so a good subject for testing this book. It has more interesting songs than just the plink plink beginner songs in most fingerstyle guitar books. And the duets with my teacher just bring me joy. It has the beginning exercises for spanish style music as well as blues. I like it so much, I bought this copy for my instructor.

United States on Oct 16, 2022

Lee: As background, my undergraduate degree (50-years ago) is in music (tuba major) so I have a good grounding in the rudiments of music. I also played Fender bass and electric guitar professionally so I also know my way around a fretboard, but I always played guitar and bass by ear and never formally studied classical guitar or polished my reading skills, hence my purchase of Solo Guitar Playing (along with a new classical guitar).

The first pages of Solo Guitar Playing present a cursory overview of the basics of how to read music, giving you just enough of the basics to be able to play the exercises that follow. That said, if you have never studied a musical instrument with a teacher, you'll probably struggle if you plan to go it alone with Noad's book. The book also presents more advanced musc reading instruction as the exercises become technically more demanding.

The exercises are enjoyable and fun to play. They first few are quite simple, as one would expect. But in about 60-pages you'll be playing exercises that sound like real music.

While you can use this book to self-teach, as I am, I think the book is probably better used with a qualified teacher as many...

United States on Sep 05, 2022

The Buy Guy: I love how great this book makes my fingers feel. They haven’t felt so alive since I first learned to two my own shoes.

Germany on Jul 18, 2022

Wood Sliver: This may be one of the industry standards as far as guitar education, BUT... it is enough of a challenge to learn something completely new (guitar) without having to struggle with the archaic font- whether it is chapter headers, or the tiny fretting hand notations placed on the musical score. If the fret notations, note and staff line converge, it tends to get 'blobby' and your guess is as good as mine. Really, should a raw learner be guessing? The next larger font in a format that is not from the 1960's would make this a joy to learn from.

Canada on Jun 08, 2022

Amazon Customer: J'ai plusieurs livres d'anthologie de noad que j'ai plus de vingt ans ,j'ai acheté les deux volumes , car j'ai confiance en Frédéric noad .

Canada on Jan 26, 2021

Giuseppe: Premetto che mi sto cimentando da autodidatta allo studio della chitarra classica.
Dopo aver consultato varie fonti credo che questo metodo sia uno di quelli meglio strutturati.
Un'infarinatura iniziale sulla lettura dello spartito e i concetti di base sono necessari.

Italy on Dec 09, 2020

R. F. Sousa: The best way to learn how to play an instrument is certainly playing it and although it might seem obvious that is not the principle many instructional books adapt. Well, Solo Guitar Playing I is different at that point because there is very little text and a lot of music. I can say that this book covers three main principles of Classical Guitar Playing:
1)Technique
2) Music Reading
3) Repertoire

I have been playing the classical guitar for about 20 years now, but have played by ear most of the time. Finally last year I decided to go back and learn how to read music for the classical guitar. My first choice was Sight Reading For The Classical Guitar (Robert Benedict). I finished the levels I,II, and III. I realized that the book skipped some things like teaching a certain note before it appeared on the exercises. So I came across Noad's book on the internet. I got to see the first edition of it at the library and decided to get it. Well, I take it everywhere. You can see that there is a great mind behind the book because he will give the right suggestions to fix the mistakes that novice students are likely to make and to correct those who are self taught. Besides...

United States on Jan 16, 2014

Paul: Learning my first musical instrument and learning how to read music at 46 is quite the challenge - I've tried other books previously, but they seemed to jump forward too quickly for my comprehension; this book is a step by step by step approach - practice practice practice, turn the page...I've heard that from beginner to end of book is about 2yrs? For these old hands, seems about right. My only beef is that the CD starts at page 49 - from then on it's awesome to actually hear what it is your are attempting to play - before page 49....I hope it sounds right!! My advice would be to not get too hung up on completing every lesson in each chapter - some of the pieces sounded so awful from my hands that I couldn't continue to practice them - but sometime later when I did a loop back, I found that my subsequent practice on later material meant the earlier stuff was easily accomplished.

my second piece of advice - don't give up.

oh and make sure you get the book that has the CD with it!!

Canada on Dec 24, 2012