It has taken me a couple of months to get through the first 6 stages of the book. I found these more motivating than the songbook. Sandercoe does have videos showing you how to play classic guitar riffs (like Smoke on the Water, Seven Nation Army, Creep) but these aren’t included in the book. The emphasis is very much on the rhythm side of guitar playing which isn’t where crowd pleasing showing off lies. Possibly the answer is “any of them”, choose the ones that appeal to your musical taste. I found each stage came with a list of 10 songs but I didn’t know which to focus on to improve my skills. I haven’t made a great deal of use of this yet. There is an associated songbook, each stage enables a few different songs. I also feel somewhat triumphant that I can do apparently notorious F-barre chord although don’t ask me to change to and from any other chord at any great rate. I got on really well with the chord change aspect of each stage, you’re invited to record how many chord changes you can do in a minute – which is absolutely my thing! I have a spreadsheet recording how my pace has increased over time. A key element of learning chords is “fingering”, which finger goes where. The book is divided into 9 stages, in each stage new chords are introduced as well as associated techniques, such as rhythm patterns and in the later stages scales and fingerstyle picking. There are also purely app based guitar course but that seemed a bit modern for my tastes. His videos are quite casual in their feel but focussed and well put together. Looking around similar video courses Justin Sandercoe is, by comparison, clearly a very good teacher. The videos are typically less than 10 minutes long, which is ideal. The book is accompanied by a substantial website ( ), which includes free video versions of the lessons in this book, amongst much other, mainly video, material. It turns out this somewhat arbitrary method of selection has worked out quite well. To be honest I picked the book largely because it was ring-bound, a quick search reveals many other options but envisaging how I would use the book a ring-bound version seemed to make sense. I’m a big fan of book learning, so when I decided to learn how to play the guitar a book was the obvious place to start. This review is a bit of a departure for me, it is of Beginner’s Course by Justin Sandercoe.
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