The Complete Chet Atkins Guitar Method

Rating:
Summary: Learn to play like Chet Atkins
Review: This book has done a lot for my playing. It is not full of real 'Chet' music though, more a lesson to teach you how to get there.

You'll need to buy some Chet Atkins song books, such as the one for the Album 'Almost Alone' to really start sounding like the man himself.

Never the less I love Chet and I love this book

Rating:
Summary: Maybe it's what you need; it's what I need.
Review: This book has many of the common faults of Mel Bay company's guitar books: It has very little in the way of verbal aid. It's page after page of staffs, notes, etudes, exercises, with no guidance on how to move through them and learn, no advice for example on how to properly do a palm mute (as most of the examples on the CD are played), nor how to coordinate the right hand fingers, etc.

Then there's a superficial fault (also characteristic of many Mel Bay books): It seems way too elementary when you glance through it. When I ordered, I did so guardedly, thinking, "After all the years you've been playing, another elementary method is not what you need. Would Chet Atkins put his name on an elementary method and call it the Chet Atkins Method?" I hoped not.

When I got it and looked through it the first time, I thought, "Hosed again. It's for kids and beginners." Most of the etude songs are traditional or Foster tunes--Streets of Laredo, Marine Hymn, American the Beautiful. But I listened to the disk anyway. And as I did I thought, "Well, I can't play that stuff myself now." So I looked deeper at it, and tried a couple tunes. And found that this is a book I can use.

It has to be something you can use. But if you've ever listened to Chet and thought, "Man, that's so sweet" as he does his thumb-bass pickin', and haven't been able to get it down, this may be for you. I can play typical rock lead and blues lead, but this is something different. The basic technique Chet uses in much of his work is called "Travis picking," after Merle Travis, and that's what this book is all about. ALL about. And that's really a good bit of what I'd want to learn from Chet. (Could anyone ever learn EVERYTHING Chet did?)

So if you're looking for a way to learn THAT--Travis picking, that thumb-bass fingerpicking, this really turns out to be a pretty good book, and worth the time and money. The CD is useful and a good reference, but oddly enough, Travis picking looks simple enough when you read it, and you won't have any trouble without the CD. Most of the tunes will be familiar, and if they're not they're straighforward quarter note stuff, dotted quarter note at the weirdest. (Of course, you have to be able to read music to read that way, and there's a quick primer in the book on it. But don't worry--it's also all in tablature.)

So put the ego away and don't worry too much about the lack of detailed instruction. If you want to Chet-pick, pick this up. If you want more detail, I strongly recommend also "The Art of Solo Fingerpicking," by Mark Hanson. His book is also about Travis picking, but much more detailed in instruction, and more emphasis too on exercises to liberate your digits. Good scores in it, more complex than Chet's book. Start with Chet, read the technique info in Hanson, and proceed to Hanson's music.... now that's a good fingerpicking course!