Classical Studies for Pick Style Guitar - Volume 1 | Classical Guitar Sheet Music Book for Intermediate to Advanced Pick Players | Technique Focused Solo and Duet Repertoire for Study and Performance

First of all, I was a student at Berklee and studied with Bill Levitt. Bill Levitt createdgreat methodologies for pick style guitar. However, I say this with fondness, he hada religious attitude that nothing was played with fingers.I grew up studying with a great Jazz player, Lenny Frank who taught using a pick, using fingers and pick and fingers. But not Bill Levitt. Using the right hand fingers was treated as something evil.While Classical Guitar was finally considered a "legitimate" instrument, there was a schoolof mostly arch top players that were incredible musicians. An example that Bill Levitt selectsas one of the best would be Johnny Smith. It's not unlike Benny Goodman playing a clarinet concerto to get jazz accepted by serious musicians. You have to realize this was all coming from jazz musicians from the bebop era and the great arch top chord solo guitar players.Bill obviously researched through thousands of classical studies for guitar, or in some casessingle note studies for cello or other instrument. He found ones that could be playedwith a pick. Yes, they are great pieces. Yes, they are great for developing clean amazingtechnique. Yes, you should understand the underlying chord theory, best accomplished bystudying the book with a knowledgeable teacher.It's a great book. It's also a great book to play with your fingers but you couldn't saythat to Bill.Bill ran the guitar department with no variations permitted. Students went through theBill Levitt series of books, though very few guitar students ever graduated. To get college credit you had to be able to start at page 60 of book 1. Should a teacherimprovise and teach other stuff, that was outlawed. One should keep Bill Levitt's philosophies and goals in mind to better understand and play the pieces.Each semester a student had to give a recital, selecting a piece from this book, memorize itand perform it before a group of professors for a grade.Bill was a great arranger and all the pieces are sequentially organized in difficulty and learning experiences.All of them are worthy performance pieces. I use the book with students that generallyplay them with their fingers. For example, many of the early pieces are Carcassi studiesand were written to teach how to use one's fingers. Playing them on a pick, great practice,another sound, but many are obviously designed for the use of fingers. Bill's not looking,you can use your fingers too.This book is first and foremost an attempt to help arch top guitar players legitimate acceptance. In the process he created a fine book.I highly recommend it both to pick style players but also for classical studies.

Classical guitar is almost always played fingerstyle, and never with a pick. I prefer using a pick, and this book has plenty of studies, etudes & classical pieces that can be played pick-style. I've been teaching guitar since 1988 and the music store where I taught several years ago carried this book. I bought a copy and used it for lessons with intermediate to advanced students, and they loved it. They eventually ordered this book so they can have it for their repertoire. It features compositions by Carcassi, Sor, J. S. Bach and others. It's a great collection.

Long, long ago I learned to play an arrangement from Ernesto Lecuona's "Malagueña" for pick-style guitar. It was great, although Flamenco is almost always finger style.The same can be said of the pieces and arrangements in this book. They are at the heart finger style classical pieces, but they sound fabulous on my archtop. And yes, I've played some of these in the past, classical style, on my Hernadis classic. They sound both different and the same, if you can follow me --- the same at heart but different in expression.These are also technically interesting. The pieces start at a lower intermediate level and build up to reasonably advanced. In addition to making some great music, both the right and left hands get a great workout. Applying plectrum technique to what are inherently finger style pieces really develop right hand picking.In short, if you're a skeptic, you're about to be convinced. You can play these finger style if you wish--- right on your archtop if you like--- but please do play plectrum style as well.The only downside to the book is that the scores, while certainly legible enough, are hand-written. Come on now, the publisher could have typeset these without going bankrupt. I'll still go five stars as a rating but four and half would be appropriate.

a classic. i took lessons from one of Leavitt's students from Berklee. he recommended this book ofcourse, when I was looking for a book to learn classical on, but I was still a picker on electric. this is great material, a bit difficult in places, but awesome. my only problem with it is that it has duets. i feel all books like this should be written for solo. but the Bach arrangements, and the Sor and Carcassi are enough material to learn for a while, not to mention the Moto Perpetuo of Paganini. check out Mel Bay modern guitar method, vols. 5-7, which also have great picking classics.

Everything is clearly laid out with suggested fingerings. The book starts easy and gets progressively harder as one might expect.It's a great exercise to practice reading and work on more subtle aspects of your picking technique, like inside and outside picking, string skipping, making sure your notes sound "legato" or flush against one another etc.I'd definitely recommend it.I've been playing for ~ 6 years and have a background in funk, r&b, rock, blues, and lately have been studying jazz.

This is a great book for working on puck hand technique and you also can be musical at the same time, it's a real fun way to work on chops and learn a piece of music. You can't beat it for the price, I had the chance of meeting Mr Leavitt who builded that guitar program at Berklee and he was a genius, this book has help my chops so much.

Brings another world to the ears. The author says use your own fingerings in spots and I do. I also steer clear of barre chords. 1/3rd of book are duets, but there's still lots of good music within the duets.