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.

The aim of this volume is to provide graded material for the practice of the tremolo finger pattern, p.a.m.i.  The control is gained from the practice of this graceful cyclic movement can be applied to tremolo variants, arpeggio patterns and scale playing.

The following pieces deal first with the first string tremolo, then with the inner string tremolo and finally with the tremolo moving from string to string.  At each stage the tremolo is explored as a repetitive pedal note, a melody note and as a rhythmic unit.

• Dance in D
• Sliding
• Bee on G
• Warrior Mode
• Three Speed Spin
• Spanish Tremolo
• Air
• Mirror Mode
• Wild Dance
• Dance in G
• Trembling Blues
• Moorish Dance
• Sentimental Song
• Gitala