Alfred's Teach Yourself to Play Guitar: Everything You Need to Know to Start Playing the Guitar! (Teach Yourself Series)

This is a very good book to get if your trying to learn how to play for the first time. I don't know much about how to play a guitar. This takes you step by step and breaks down how everything works on the guitar. It gives you pretty simple songs to play. I would recommend getting this book if your wanting to learn how to play.

This is an excellent guitar instruction book for beginners. I had never even picked up a guitar before, but thanks to this book I am playing songs on the guitar without the expense of lessons. This book will teach you how to read notes and also where they are located on the guitar, as well as what fingers to use on the left hand. This book also teaches tabulature for those interested in that. All around, this is a fantastic guitar instruction book for beginners.

My son has been following this boook for one month. Along with teacher guiding him once a week it’s been fantastic. He is 1/2 way through the book and it’s been great he understands it and I really like that it’s notes and guitar tab form.

Edit 3/31/2014: Changing my rating to 4 stars overall. Overall, this is a challenging and rewarding book. If you are a beginner and don't mind being challenged, this book is good.I own Melbay's expanded book 1 and the Hal Leonard Book 1-3. These are more gradual and develop skills in steps.The Alfred book makes a steeper curve and asks more from the student. The pieces are more difficult but rewarding and sound good. Note that by the end of this book, the lessons are in hammer on/off, bending, etc. - all very pleasing to play and hear. The Hal Leonard series get to the same techniques in book 3.Good luck and enjoyOriginal review:Book = 4 Stars. Slightly above beginer level. Very Good collection of songs that can be motivating e.g. Pacebel's Canon. They take you all the way up to hammer on and off, slides, bending notes, etc. Makes for a lot of musical pleasure.The CD makes me want to tear my hair out. A CD can be very valuable to get an idea of what sound to make,especially when starting out on a new song. Here are my complaints:1. The second guitar that is playing chord accompanyment drowns out the songs and makes it very frustrating to understand what the notes are. What is the point of this?2. This is supposed to be a stupid enhanced CD and on a Computer you can play just the notes or the accompanyment. Using the CD on a computer is still terrible since the MIDI part does not seem to work well on my laptops.3. I am short on time, as many adults are, and it would be nice to just pop in the CD, grab the guitar and go when i have a few minutes.

I purchased this item for an 11 year old, and she thinks it's wonderful. She's already started playing short songs on the guitar and I credit this product for doing so.The book is very descriptive and educational, definitely the best Teach-Yourself book I have seen yet. The notes were easy to learn and the images they showed made learning easy as pie!Definitely a must have for a new guitarist!

Slightly technical, but overall a great book

This is a great book. It teaches you to play at a comfortable pace. AND it teaches you to play at a correct tempo via the c.d. That way when you go to play with your friends later, you don't look like an idiot.

Learning to play a guitar is hard enough without dealing with a very poorly written program. It is set up to need the CD in the computer to be able to run so each 30 second episode takes longer than that to load from the CD. In the intro, the instructor says to click on the arrow in the upper left to advance to the next lesson, but there is no arrow, just a link to re-open the box which asks you to select a section and a lesson. If the lesson is down on the list, you have to scroll down each time. If you close the program, then open it later, it does not go to where you were, even if you closed it with a lesson running, but puts up the window to select which section and which 30 second lesson you want to load. The video quality is poor on either of my laptops with high resolution displays, or on my external 22" monitor with a lot of rippling in either full screen or windowed display..I skipped ahead to some of the lessons which show you how to play notes and chords in a mini-song but the display of the strings is so hard to see that it is essentially useless. It did not take long to realize that it is easier to learn from a book, than from a poorly-written program.Worst Christmas present I ever received!