Frederick Noad Solo Guitar Playing 2

Working Through Frederick Noad Solo Guitar Playing 2

Frederick Noad Solo Guitar Playing 2 sits in the intermediate lane of solo guitar instruction, and it does exactly what you would expect from its predecessor. It builds on basic technique and moves into more nuanced voice leading, fingerstyle independence, and pieces that require you to think about both melody and bass simultaneously. The book assumes you have already survived the first volume or its equivalent. The structure is fairly standard for Noad. You get sections on scales and arpeggios that feed directly into the repertoire pieces. The etudes and arrangements are where most people spend their time. Each piece comes with fingering suggestions, which you should take as recommendations rather than commands. Noad was pragmatic about that in the first volume, and he stays consistent here. I spent about three weeks working through the first four chapters of Frederick Noad Solo Guitar Playing 2. The piece that caught me up was the Bach prelude arrangement. Not because it was hard, but because my left hand kept collapsing into a cluster shape on the G major harmony. I had to slow it down to forty beats per minute and isolate the thumb movement across strings four through six. Once I stopped trying to play the whole measure at once and broke it into individual bass notes with the thumb, it clicked. That workaround applies to most of the chord-melody transitions in this book. You have to treat the thumb independently rather than assuming it will find its way through muscle memory.

The technical studies in Chapter Two focus on alternating bass patterns. This is not just about keeping time. It is about training your ring finger to land cleanly on string four while your thumb handles the bass on strings five and six. The exercise that trips up the most students is the one in measure thirty-two of study number seven. It looks straightforward on paper. In practice, your third finger wants to drag against the second finger when you transition from the D major shape to the B minor shape. The fix is to lift the third finger completely off the string before you move it. Even a millimeter of contact creates friction that slows everything down. The repertoire section starts with shorter pieces and gets longer as you move forward. The Spanish romance arrangement is included, which is fine if you already know it. It is not useful if you are encountering it for the first time. A better use of that chapter is the Villa-Lobos étude number one. It teaches you to use the right hand fingers in a specific rotation pattern without relying on the palm for stability. Most players prop their hand too hard against the soundboard. Noad expects a floating bridge anchor point, and it takes two or three weeks of deliberate practice to stop defaulting to the planted-hand habit. There are a few limitations worth mentioning upfront. The book does not include a companion audio track in most printings. You will need to find recordings separately or figure out passages by ear. The notation is accurate but sometimes light on articulation markings. You will have to make interpretive decisions on your own, which is actually a good thing if you want to develop your own voice. It is less helpful if you are looking for hand-holding on expression. The layout also puts the tablature below the staff on most pages, but not all of them. A few pieces in the later chapters revert to standard notation only, which caught me off guard when I was already deep into the book.

If you are coming from a complete beginners guide and feel like Frederick Noad Solo Guitar Playing 2 is too much of a jump, there are transition exercises you can do on your own. Take any simple folk melody you know by heart and try to add a bass note on every beat using only your thumb. If you can do that cleanly at a slow tempo, you are ready for this book. If not, spend another month on basic arpeggio patterns before picking it up. The biggest mistake I see people make with this method is rushing through the etudes to get to the songs. The etudes are not filler. They are where the hand coordination actually gets built. You can skip a few if you are confident, but doing that consistently will show up later when you hit the piece that combines everything. The book works best when you respect the sequence and move through it at a pace that lets the movements feel automatic before you add speed. Print copies are available through most music retailers and online bookshops. Some digital versions exist on sheet music platforms, though the quality of the PDF rendering varies between publishers. Noad's arrangements are in the public domain in many cases, so unofficial transcriptions appear regularly. I usually recommend sticking to the published editions because the editorial fingering choices have been tested by teachers and students over decades. Cheap scans sometimes blur the note heads or misalign the tabs, which wastes more time than it saves.

I keep my copy worn around the edges. The pages have annotations from different teachers I worked with, and the fingerings in pencil are mostly still legible after ten years. That kind of wear tells you this book gets used. It is not a display piece. If you put in the work, it will give you something back.