Essential Guitar Skill is a collection of graded pieces for technical study representing a particular approach that is relevant to the modern player.  These pieces can be commenced well within the first year of study.

The music is not avant garde but reflects, like some modern pop and film music, certain stylistic elements in 20th Century music dating from Claude Debussey and Eric Satie onwards.

The reason for choosing that particular approach is that it offers considerable rhythmic impetus to the study of technique.  It also represents a style well suited to an instrument so supremely expressive of myth, mood and mode.

This volume is mainly concerned with right hand arpeggio technique and attempts to analyse through music the basic finger patterns involved in fluent arpeggio playing.

Initially the pieces are concerned with simple rising and falling movements on four strings and then with more complex patterns that rise and fall within the overall ascent and descent of the chord.  Five and six string arpeggios and left hand arpeggio patterns are then dealt with.

• Slow Circle
• Falling
• Rising
• Mixolydian Dance
• Rag in C
• Short Prelude
• Gibbous Moon
• Dark Prelude
• Study
• Closing Circle