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You can learn to play music using a variety of resources including teachers, online resources, and books.
Hal Leonard’s Fingerpicking Beatles is full of accessible arrangements of popular Beatles songs. The tunes are suitable for late beginner/early intermediate through advanced players. The arrangements often have simplified rhythms, they sometimes leave out either bass notes or inner harmony notes where they would be difficult to grab, they stay mostly below the 5th fret, and they are in guitar friendly keys. I think this is a fun book that is well worth the money.
The simplicity of many of the arrangements is something that I prefer for a repertoire book like this. Hal Leonard has done the work of putting the tunes into guitar-friendly keys and providing basic arrangements that are entirely recognizable and effective. Aside from the melody, the arrangements often include important bass lines, horn lines, and harmonies. For experienced players, the tunes present many opportunities for embellishment.
Some tunes are arranged in more of a melody and bass style, some feature more arpeggiation, and some feature alternating bass lines. The style typically fits the essence of the tune.
1) Excellent repertoire from across the Beatles discography. Variety of upbeat and slower tunes (and everything in-between).
2) Provides treble clef lead sheets (melody with harmonizing chords written above) as well as treble clef and TAB guitar arrangements.
3) Generally simplified arrangements as I detailed above.
4) Some fretting hand fingering is included, but there isn’t any picking hand fingering.
5) Longer tunes have lots of page turns at sometimes inconvenient places.
6) No audio access.
The book doesn’t get into the modern percussive techniques used by modern players like Michael Hedges, Don Ross, Andy McKee, Mike Dawes, etc. No thumb slaps, guitar body percussion, or tapping.
For most of the tunes you could use an acoustic steel string or classical nylon string guitar since most arrangements don’t require using your fretting hand thumb over the top.
Published by Hal Leonard. © 1996
eBook: Arranging for Fingerstyle Guitar: go to http://joemcmurray.com/checkout/ to purchase a pdf of my eBook.
Riding the Wave: my second fingerstyle guitar album is available on all streaming platforms.
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