The Complete Idiot's Guide to Acoustic Guitar Songs: 30 Acoustic Guitar Hits

By: Alfred Publishing Staff

The Complete Idiot's Guide songbooks are designed to get novice guitarists playing immediately, and playing the songs that inspired them to pick up a guitar in the first place. Each song in The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0739046276
• ISBN13: 9780739046272
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Alfred Music
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 9.0" x 11.8"

Customer Reviews

Useful guide for middle-aged folks like me.

The guitar was not my first instrument and I had been reading music for over 40 years when I picked it up, so that explains the difference between the first rater's comments and my own. After two weeks of playing the guitar, I was wanting more than I was learning by ear and from random acquaintances, and this book (along with iplaymusic's how-to guitar lessons with CD) filled my need. The music is, however, more from my era (born in mid-1950's), and younger musicians would do better to download some chords and tabs from any of the free music sites on-line. This book is more useful than just chords in that it offers fingering advice, rhythmic specifics (the hardest advice to find, in my experience, in learning the guitar), and all in standard musical notations. I've two years of university music theory/comp, and from that knowledge base, I applaud the music theory sections. I believe that they would help a novice, picking up guitar as the first instrument, to understand what is going on with harmonic progressions in pop songs. Some of these songs are beyond my ability, still (the acoustical Layla, for instance, or some of the more complex fingerpicked songs), but at least one, Horse with No Name, should be playable within hours of getting the book. Ideally, you'd have a CD or MP3 files of these songs, as recorded by the original artists, to begin to link staff and TAB notation to the sorts of sounds we're familiar with. The introductions concerning musicianship and the recording artists themselves are really quite interesting.