Customer Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding beginner fingerstyle instruction
Comment: This book is designed to teach fingerstyle guitar from the beginning. It begins with basic exercises for both hands, and uses the "building block" approach from there. If you follow this book from start to finish, you will have a solid fingerstyle technique and be able to play just about any song.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not much instructional value for me
Comment: This is not well organized and the CD is not much help. His playing of the songs at the end of the book is more about him showing off how fast he can play than about teaching the material. I wouldn't listen to a set by this guy in a bar. He can play the notes fast but lacks the feel of the music.
There are much better introductions to fingerstyle blues, especially Kenny Sultan's series.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This beginner loves it
Comment: I may be in the running for the world's lowest quotient of native guitar playing talent. I took lessons for a couple of years and practiced regularly and was always frustrated. I pretty much gave up for the last 5 years. Then about 6 months ago I bought Beginning Fingerstyle Blues Guitar and am now enjoying the guitar the way I origionaly thought I would. I still have a screwy connection between my mind an fingers but at least I can finger pick enough blues to have a good time, if not let anybody else listen.
The book is nicely paced, well written and the CD, if a bit unevenly produced is a helpful addition. And most of all it has restored my enjoyment of the guitar.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Comment: After buying a number of fingerstyle guitar books, I must say that this is one of the few books I will recommend to my friends to buy.
What I liked about this book is that it is easy to follow and with practice, you would be able to play blues songs on the guitar. The pieces given are both in tab and music score and caters to newbies as well as those who are intermediate level in their playing skills.
This book not only teaches you how to play blues but it includes many fingerstyle techniques as well. It has almost all that you need to learn about fingerstyle and customised to blues music. However, you can use the same techniques for other styles after you have mastered the basiscs.
The CD could have been better and I agree with the comments on the ramblings. Can be quite distracting. It would have been better if they had scripted the comments properly rather than ad-lib along the way. The music pieces on the CD are great and you would like to have them in your repertoire.
I give this book a 5 star nevertheless.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not my favorite style of blues
Comment: There are many styles of acoustic blues. If you are going to invest the time needed to learn to play, you must find the style that most touches your soul. For me, this set of book and cd isn't the one.
Try Happy Traum's 2 dvd set "Easy Steps to Acoustic Blues Guitar", way better in my opinion, and more soulful blues. The 2nd dvd by Traum in this set is a masterfull teaching of fingerpicking, whereas the first is more on strumming patterns and learning the basic form. I recommend both, but if it is only fingerpicking you want, get #2 by itself.
Happy Traum is a great teacher...the best I've encountered for home study.
Also try his dvd "The Blues Bag" for 11 blues songs in varied styles.
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