William Leavitt Modern Method For Guitar

Getting Past the First Hurdle of William Leavitt Modern Method For Guitar

I picked up William Leavitt Modern Method For Guitar back in 1993 because my jazz guitar teacher told me it was the closest thing to a conservatory curriculum you could teach yourself from. He wasn't wrong, but he also didn't mention that Book One alone would eat about six months of your life if you were actually trying to absorb it rather than just flipping through pages. The book is structured around reading first, playing second. You start on middle C position and build from there. Most people quit within the first twenty pages because they expected to be rocking out instead of sight-reading single-note lines in first position. The method itself is built on the idea that a guitarist should be able to read standard notation as fluently as a classical musician reads sheet music. Every exercise is written out in notation with tab sometimes included in later editions. The technical approach emphasizes proper right-hand fingerstyle technique using imala notation for the fingers. You pluck with your thumb, index, middle, and ring fingers in specific patterns that repeat throughout the book. This isn't arbitrary. It mirrors the approach classical guitarists use, and it translates directly to jazz comping and soloing later on.

William Leavitt Modern Method For Guitar

The core problem I ran into when working through the early exercises was my thumb refusing to stay independent. The book assigns the thumb to the third, second, and first strings while the other three fingers handle the fourth, fifth, and sixth strings. At first my thumb kept climbing up to the higher strings whenever I got nervous about timing. I solved this by literally taping a small piece of washi tape across the third string at the first fret as a tactile reminder. It sounds ridiculous but it worked within three weeks of daily practice. Your brain needs a physical constraint before it builds the neural pathway for things like this. Here's something most people don't understand about this method. The scales and arpeggios aren't arranged in the most musical order. You'll encounter a diminished seventh arpeggio in the key of B before you've fully internalized the major scale in G. This was deliberate on Leavitt's part. He wanted pattern recognition to develop independently of tonal comfort. When I finally stopped trying to make every exercise sound musical and just treated it as mechanical pattern work, everything sped up noticeably. The difference was roughly a month of practice time saved across the entire book. The transcription section starting around page sixty is where the method becomes genuinely useful rather than just academically rigorous. You're given short melodic phrases to notate by ear. This seems minor but it's where most self-taught guitarists hit a wall. They can play licks by rote but can't write them down or communicate them to other musicians. I spent about two weeks struggling with transcribing simple folk melodies because my rhythm notation was sloppy. I kept writing eighth notes as sixteenths when the tempo felt faster in my head. The workaround was recording myself playing at half speed with a metronome and counting aloud while I wrote. It added maybe ten minutes per exercise but cut transcription errors from roughly forty percent down to under five percent.

One counter-intuitive aspect of this method that nobody talks about is how little it addresses chord vocabulary in the early sections. You won't see a full chord diagram until well into Book One. The rationale is that single-note reading proficiency should come first so your left hand learns to navigate the fretboard without the crutch of chord shapes. This works for some people and fails completely for others. If you're someone who thinks harmonically rather than melodically, you might find yourself losing motivation because everything sounds sterile. I knew a guitarist who dropped the book after four weeks and switched to a chord-based method instead. He's now playing gigs and couldn't read a staff to save his life. That's a real tradeoff you need to consider. Another thing the book doesn't adequately prepare you for is the difference between reading music at a desk and reading it under performance conditions. The exercises assume you're practicing alone in a quiet room with the book flat on a stand. Real jazz reading happens while you're watching a bandleader count off, with other musicians breathing around you, and the chart has pencil marks from the previous player. I encountered this gap when I first sat in with a local jazz combo and realized I could read the music perfectly but couldn't keep up with the actual tempo. The book suggests tempos that are comfortably slow. A jazz tune at performance tempo feels like a different genre entirely. I had to supplement with fake books and real lead sheets to bridge that gap, which added another three to four months of parallel study. The later books expand into more advanced harmony, extended arpeggios, and modal concepts. Book Two introduces modes properly and starts connecting harmonic theory to the fretboard in ways that are still useful for modern players. Book Three goes into bebop language and more complex voice leading. The progression is logical but the pacing assumes you're either in a formal program or dedicating at least an hour daily. If you're working a full-time job and practicing thirty minutes most days, you're going to move through this at a fraction of the intended speed and you might question whether it's worth it. It is, but you need to adjust your expectations accordingly.

I should mention the download situation because people always ask about this. The book is still in print through Carl Fischer Music and various retailers. You can find PDFs floating around the internet but they're pirated copies of copyrighted material. The legitimate route is purchasing the physical books or checking if your local music store can special order them. Carl Fischer occasionally runs sales where the complete three-book set drops to around forty dollars, which is reasonable given that you'd spend similar money on a few months of private lessons that wouldn't cover the same ground. There's also a genuine limitation to keep in mind. This method was published in 1966 and reflects the pedagogical assumptions of that era. It doesn't address electric guitar tone, amplification, or the stylistic demands of rock and funk playing. If your end goal is to play in a fusion band or a studio session that reads pop charts with slash chords and bass digits, you'll need to supplement heavily. I used Leavitt for reading proficiency and paired it with Mark Levine's Jazz Theory Book for harmonic vocabulary. That combination covered roughly eighty percent of what I needed for professional work. The remaining twenty came from on-the-job experience that no book can fully prepare you for. The final thing worth noting is that the physical format matters more than you'd think. The spiral-bound editions that some vendors sell are functional. The hardcover versions from Carl Fischer are more durable but the pages don't lay flat on a guitar stand. I went through two hardcover copies before switching to the spiral version, mostly because I was constantly bending the spine trying to force the book to stay open at page one hundred and twelve. That's a minor annoyance but it adds up over hundreds of hours of practice.