Beyond Basics: The Fingerstyle Christmas Guitar Collection, Vol. 1 and 2

Master fingerstyle guitarist Mark Hanson teaches, note-for-note, eight of his beautiful solo guitar arrangements. Titles are: It Came Upon a Midnight Clear * The First Noel * Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas * Angels We Have Heard on High * Silent Night * O Little Town of Bethlehem * Joy to the World * Winter Wonderland. DVD special features include: tuning segment, additional video tips, matching book/CD preview, additional product previews, and Internet connectivity.
Customer Review: Absolutely Fantastic – both Musically and Educationally
Put simply, this DVD from Mark Hanson is very well done.

If you’re learning fingerstyle at the intermediate or higher level and want to build a repertoire of familiar music that you can use, this DVD can quickly become indispensable. I agree that Christmas music is seasonal, and that might limit the usefulness of the pieces on this DVD, but the arrangements are excellent and well worth learning. For example, “Winter Wonderland” has a wonderfully-written walking bass line that complements the melody quite nicely, and the chord harmonies are well thought-out.

For each song on the DVD Mark shows how to play the entire piece, and breaks each song apart into smaller, easily learnable chunks that allow you to work on each piece one phrase at a time. (It’s useful to have a DVD player with some form of A-B looping, but it’s not required.)

Guitar tablature is provided for all the pieces, so musicians that are dots-and-lines challenged need not fear.

In closing, I think that the DVD is great for fingerstyle artists that are looking for some creative Christmas arrangements, and for students that want to stretch their fingerstyle skills in new directions.

PS – I also recommend looking at Mark’s “Accent on Music” (www.accentonmusic.com) web site for a full list of all Mark’s books; most of which are available from Amazon. “BUY NOW”