Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Beginning music instruction on the Acoustic Guitar. Designed to take the beginner through the basics of learning the guitar, including rhythm and lead playing. Clearly illustrated with many diagrams, it also contains a complete chord chart and all music is written in both standard music notation and tablature with lyrics and melody lines. The companion audio CD includes Tom Dooley, Worried Man Blues, Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms, Dark Hollow, Amazing Grace, Pallet On Your Floor, Way Downtown, Wabash Cannonball, and others.

Rating : - Excellent guitar instruction for self-study
I had difficulty finding guitar instructors in my area for the first 18 months of owning a guitar, so I turned to Bert Casey's 2 volume series: Acoustic Guitar Primer, and Acoustic Guitar Part 2. These are extremely well done and easy to follow, and each lesson builds nicely on the previous ones, so that by the end of Book 1 you know several chords and techniques such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, and particularly country bass runs The only drawback is that most of the material in book 1 is traditional or folk songs, which doesn't necessarily hold my interest as well as rock or blues, but this is a relatively minor criticism. I found the DVD somewhat helpful, but a bit distracting. Listening to the CDs included with the books helps focus one more on the feel of the strings and the sounds, instead of encouraging one to look at what the left hand is doing.