David Hodge

When one picks up the guitar, or any instrument, the initial stages of learning are a heady rush. You can’t take in all the basics fast enough, but you’re making music and making progress so you just keep going. At some point, though, you either hit a plateau or you realize that while you’re making music, it doesn’t always sound, well, musical. Or at least as effortlessly musical as other musicians seem to sound.

Total Acoustic Guitar, by Andrew DuBrock, gets you over that initial hump from eager but idling beginner to musical intermediate. The author tackles three major areas – rhythm, finger picking and lead playing – and guides you through the various steps to become more skilled and confident in each of these important facets of acoustic guitar playing.

After a brief, but surprisingly thorough overview of the basic skills beginners should know by this point (open position chords and simple strumming – including alternate bass style and easy walking bass lines), Total Acoustic Guitar introduces the reader to syncopation, playing scratch rhythms and rhythm fills, and using arpeggios as a rhythm technique. You also tackle acoustic guitar power chords and learn some very cool and exotic sounding open string chords that are simple variations on the open position chords you learned when you first started playing guitar.    

The fingerpicking section starts out with very simple and basic picking patterns and takes you up through Travis picking and pinching techniques. You’ll be able to play some impressive blues and finger style guitar when you’ve worked your way through this part of the book.

The final section on leads teaches both technique and the basic theory necessary to understand how to apply the techniques to the music you play. Pentatonic scales (major and minor) and blues scales are examined, as well as the normal major scale and natural minor. You also get instruction on mixing scales to fit the mood and style of a song. DuBrock also teaches the importance of slurs (hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides and bends) and his teachings of the use of open strings and double stop playing will make your acoustic solos sing out.

The CD that accompanies this book is well produced. DuBrock has made very good arrangements of familiar Public Domain songs to illustrate the techniques he teaches. All the audio examples are clear and the reader should find them all very helpful. 

Andrew DuBrock is an outstanding teacher as well as a fine writer. Anyone who’s read Acoustic Guitar Magazine at any point in the last ten years is undoubtedly familiar with his fantastic work as both writer and editor. He has an incredible knack for making the trickiest of techniques understandable to anyone and his writing is as interesting and entertaining as it is enlightening and educational. More important, he can inspire you to take the steps needed to take your playing to the next level. He is encouraging and supportive all along the way, just through his written words alone.

If you’re relatively new to the guitar and have gotten to a point in your playing where you’re wondering if you’re ever going to be better and make everything thing click musically, then you should give Total Acoustic Guitar a read. If you follow DuBrock’s instruction and advice, you will undoubtedly see and hear marked improvement in your guitar playing.

Peace

Suppose, just for the sake of discussion, that you’ve decided to take up playing guitar. Any instrument would do, really, but let’s go with guitar because we’re guitarists, after all!

Now suppose you’ve turned up for your first lesson with your teacher. You’ve got your guitar out and tuned and you’re holding it and ready to go. And your teacher sits down in front of you with his or her guitar, looks at you and says, “Do this” and then plays something.

You go “Like this?” and, more likely than not, don’t play anything like resembling what the teacher played.

He or she is patient, though, and says, “No, like this” and repeats what was played earlier. All this goes on for a half hour or so, however long the lesson lasts.

How much do you think you’re going to learn from a lesson, or even a series of lessons like this?

Before you answer that, think of how many people swear by learning through watching videos on YouTube or anywhere else on the Internet. Yes, there are some very good instructors (and some excellent lessons) out there, but unless you are at a point in your guitar studies where you are not concerned with things like finger position or rhythm or timing or anything that you might have find that you have ongoing questions about as you learn a particular bit of music or technique, how are you going to be able to learn simply from watching a video?

The answer, very simply, is that you’re not learning to play but rather to copy. Not that you’re not playing, but unless you already have a keen musical mind you’re not going to be able to readily apply your new knowledge in order to keep growing as a musician.

If you’re serious about learning to play, you want to use as many different sources as you can find. But you especially want to use sources that stress the aspects of music that you truly need to learn – rhythm and harmony (chords) in particular. And it’s also important that you don’t put yourself in a mindset where you find yourself believing in “magic answers,” meaning that there’s some single trick out there that you don’t know but if you did you’d be light years better than you are now.

This time of year people often set about making wish lists and goals for the upcoming year. If progress as a guitarist and musician happens to be on your list, then be sure to give yourself reasonable expectations. And expect to have to work to meet your goals.

And take in every bit of information you can find, especially if you have to read it in order to get the most out of it!

Peace