The Essentials: Chord Charts, Scales and Lead Patterns for Guitar

Rating:
Summary: Good Beginnings
Review: Recently got First Stage Guitar Chord Chart by Chris Lopez and Essentials by Bruce Arnold. I'm a weekend geetar picker just getting started. I'm mostly interested in learning chords and scales. I thought both books were good they both gave simple presentations of the most important chords and scales. Essentials has an interesting quark in that you can download videos and mp3 files that go with various parts of the book. I found the mp3 files to be very useful to jam over but I'm over here on a dial up connection so couldn't use the video stuff that much. One thing I did watch though was movies about common problems found with each chord. It showed me all the common problems people have when learning chords and I thought that was pretty cool. Ya really can't go wrong with either book though - they lay everything out very clearly and are enjoyable to work with.

Rating:
Summary: Useful Collection of Information
Review: This is a rather odd book in that it is simply a collection of pieces of useful information found exactly as they appear in other Bruce Arnold books. What makes this book so useful is that it turns out that this book (actually more of a booklet) contains exactly the information that I most commonly reference back to in his other books. Mr. Arnold presents a system of music education that is unique as far as I can tell. I have seen no other system that provides the professional level of information, a members-only web site with a plethora of additional information AND e-mail access to the author. Yup, Mr. Arnold will personally answer your questions and you get access to the "members only" web site simply by purchasing any of his books. Every time I look at the web site, I find MORE information that either presents a new topic or clarifies something I have been struggling with.

I don't think that this book would be all that useful in and of itself. However, as an adjunct to the rest of his books on theory and technique it is an extremely handy collection of most commonly accessed information. Basically, it is the collection of "notes" that I would have eventually put together for myself so that I did not have to keep referencing multiple books for the same information over and over (because I forgot it or just "wanted to check to be sure").

This is a great collection of information if you are already using Mr. Arnold's books to learn to play guitar. It was money well spent. It just saved me the time of collecting the information (as well as figuring out what would be most useful). It is already done for you.