Rainbow Guitar
I wanted to write a beginner guitar tutor which made a really good job of teaching the pupil to read music, at the same as teaching the instrument. As simple as it sounds, there are very few guitar tutor books which teach this skill really well.
Classical guitar books, excellent though many of them are, can quickly overload the pupil with new notes. Unless the pupil is very able, it is easy to get into a situation where “learning guitar” becomes all about “learning to recognise pitches on the stave”. For many pupils, 95% of the effort is going into working out where to find the next note. Some succeed and move beyond this point, but it is fair to say that the dropout rate in the early stages is very high.
Rock and folk guitar books take a different tack, by using tablature rather than ordinary stave notation. This simple system of numbers on lines allows the pupil to make much quicker progress in the early stages. However, as with anything that we learn to do “by numbers”, we often find that we lack understanding and get blocked at a later stage – and once a pupil has acquired a certain facility with tablature, there is very little inclination to go back to basics and begin the more effortful process of learning to read music.
I felt there was a place for a series of books which on the one hand use exclusively stave notation (yes this is a TAB-free zone!), but on the other hand make the stave a friendly place, and make it fun to learn. Hence the colours (read on) …
The Rainbow Guitar books are aimed at any guitar pupil who would like to learn to read from the stave at the same time as learning to play the instrument. The gentle learning pace, and the colour-string notation, make the books particularly suitable for young beginners. But they could be just as useful for an older player, who has perhaps learned from tablature and chord diagrams, and would now like to explore the basics of the stave.
The Rainbow books got their name because they are based on a colour-string system. Each guitar or ukulele string is given a colour, and the notes on that string appear in that same colour, all the way through the books.
- The colours immediately guide you to the right string.
- At the beginning, they do almost all the reading for you! (because you only know one note on each string)
- As you progress, you start to look at the stave more closely (because you will need to distinguish several notes on each string).
- At every stage, the colours divide the stave into zones which your eye can quickly focus on.
- The more notes you learn, the more closely you will have to look at the lines and spaces on the stave.
- Later, as you move on to reading without colours, you will find you have painlessly learned far more than you realised!
Book 1
Simple melodies and song accompaniments using strings 2, 3, and 4. Starting with open strings, the book gradually builds up a range of 7 notes: D, E, G, A, B, C, D. All the music can be played with the thumb only, with thumb and fingers, or a plectrum.
£8.99 + postage
Book 2
Melodies and solo pieces up to the 3rd fret on all six strings. The book provides a mixture of melodic and chordal playing, and allows the learner to take a number of different paths through the material. Suitable for fingerstyle or plectrum playing.
£9.99 + postage.
Book 1 Supplement (free download)
This booklet can be introduced as you work through Book 1 – it gives extra tunes to practice using the same notes, and is cross-referenced to the main book at every stage. In the 2nd half of the book, there is another set of tunes with the same notes printed black rather than in the Rainbow Guitar colours.
Anyone is welcome to download and try out this booklet, but it will make a lot more sense if you have the main book to refer to.