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For Guitar Players Only ReviewThis effort by Tedesco is more successful than his _Confessions of a Guitar Player_: it's better edited overall (though still with a goodly number of spelling errors) and better structured. Perhaps it's worth reading through once and then using bits of it in conjunction with other materials.
There are two major themes in this book: sight-reading and studio work. As before in his other book, once he starts talking about studio work, all is good: he definitely knows a lot about this and offers a lot of specific musical as well as general life-philosophical advice. Based on my personal experience I can testify that this aspect of the book is very valid and quite worth reading. Another thing that is useful here is a generous set of samples of _real_ scores he used in different contexts: film, shows, recordings, etc., which shows you what to expect and differences between them. All in all, if this had been the only thing he talked about in this book, the book would have been about 40 pages long, all of it to the point and fairly concentrated, and I would have given it five stars. But, it's not the only thing, so let's get to the rest:
The first part of the book is dedicated to sight-reading. Despite what the other reviewers tell you, this part is useless. It is so because it's unsystematic, unclear, and way too short of material. What he does is basically list the notes, chromatically, along every string from I to XV position and tells you to memorise them; then he gives a few pages of per-string drills where all those notes are used. That's it. Well, if you need a fretboard layout plus a few pages of drill material for after you've learned to read well, this is good, but anything else?
Sight reading isn't an intellectual task that could be mastered by reading much and doing little -- or, at least, no more so than riding a bike or touch typing, meaning there's some expenditure of brain fuel at the very beginning but the goal is to eliminate this component, to make the process mentally effortless, automatic. The way to proceed here is to (1) take SMALL bites and (2) CHEW THEM WELL. A beginner won't be able to memorise the whole fretboard in one shot and thus won't be able to read the drills; which renders the whole affair useless. The author obviously knows his stuff as a player, but has no clue (or doesn't care) about methodology of teaching.
You need to pick just a few notes and then play a ton of material using only them for however long it takes till it's ingrained not just in your mind, but in your fingers; then add another two, and so on. Slow, yes, but digestible and reinforceable. Small bites. Another thing is chromaticity: it's silly, at least at the beginning, to memorise where flats and sharps are. It's not hard to find F sharp when your fingers know where the F is. So again, one step at a time: you don't start with a full chromatic row: you start with the notes of the C maj (A min) scale and work on them till you can flawlessly poke into them in real time. Then, from this basis, you can hit the full chromatic row much more easily. Small bites/chew well. But the book's approach is different -- all material given in one lump (too much to digest for a beginner) followed by ungraduated drills (useless).
And then, there's simply not enough drill material! Drill material is the main thing that a sight-reading course must provide. You need dozens of pages per every "bite", not like five in total. If a sight-reading book doesn't contain a megaton of specific, simple drills, it is useless, period. A beginner can't use real music for drills 'cause real music isn't graduated, and therefore compiling this sort of material _is_ the main task of an author of a sight-reading book. If this is not done, the author didn't do his job.
The next flaw is that the text is unclear. Btw, while we're at it, the book contains an appendix where a small number of relevant terms are given (sforzando, legato, this sort of thing). There are errors in it (eg, "formata" instead of "fermata", "expressio" instead of "espressivo", "signo" instead of "segno", etc.) Some explanations are fairly half-witted too, like when he explains that two half notes are four beats. Well, they are -- in 4/4 --, but in, say, 2/2 they're two beats, and what about 12/8 or 69/234.5 ? :-) In general, note values and beats have nothing to do with each other, beats being dictated by the time signature not the length of notes in a measure. I can't understand how a professional musician could make such errors, and the problem with them is that a beginner will not recognise these as errors and will learn incorrectly.
So, all in all, I'd say while the second part¹ of this book (on studio work) is worthwhile, if you're specifically after sight-reading, get something else, for example books by Benedict (for classical guitar though, but so what), or _Music Reading for Guitar_ by David Oakes. Books by William Leavitt are really good (tons of graded music, no text to speak of, goes position after position; these are really systematic, intelligent books: get both _Reading Studies_, and _Advanced Reading Studies_). Leavitt's approach is right on the money -- although I'd recommend to start from Oakes 'cause Leavitt literally has no text at all whereas Oakes explains things very nicely: his book is really two books in one -- how to read music, and how to sight-read: this is ideal for a beginner, but for a megaton of drills turn then to Leavitt... Well, something like that, you get the point.
The main problem with sight-reading books for the beginner is that there isn't a lot of literature with A LARGE AMOUNT of graduated-drill music in them, and although there's certainly a huge amount of free or near-free real music one could read, a beginner can't start from it: the ability to sight-read real music has to be slowly worked up to. Once you're there, the sky's the limit, but you gotta get there first.
Bottomline: the book is worth a selective read (mostly the second half), but it doesn't deliver on ALL its promises; beware the errors and don't expect to master sight-reading with it.
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Note 1: When I say first or second part I mean it somewhat loosely. It means "mostly first" or "mostly second" part because a small amount of stuff is scattered about.
For Guitar Players Only OverviewFor Guitar Players Only is one of the most unique books ever written for guitar. Legendary studio guitarist Tommy Tedesco shares his personal hints and exercises for improving picking technique and sight reading abilities, while offering countless other inside tips that will further your guitar career. The book includes actual parts that have been recorded for movies, television, albums, and commercials.
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