Beginning Worship Guitar: Instruction for the Worship Musician (Sandy Hoffman on Worship)

Rating:
Summary: Never played guitar before
Review: I think this is a great book for the absolute beginner. It covers all the basics for someone like me who is just starting...tuning, playing in different keys, strumming patterns, and keeping time, plus some worship songs to boot. I here there is a video that parallels this book that I plan on buying.

Rating:
Summary: A note from the author...
Review: The Beginning Worship Guitar Book is designed to equip the beginning guitarist with the necessary technical understanding
of tuning, strums, chord voicings, and chord progressions which relate specifically to contemporary worship music. It was written to prepare the beginning guitarist to tackle the challenges of learning and playing new worship songs in
today's worship styles.

Demonstrations of the songs and exercises in the Beginning
Worship Guitar book are included in the Beginning Worship
Guitar Instructional Video and DVD.

Based on the many positive responses of students who have
used this book, I have given it a rating of 5 stars.

Rating:
Summary: It's okay, but not really useful for church
Review: This book is a good book for beginning guitar students, and as a teacher of several students I will use it in my lessons. But despite its title I would recommend against buying this book if you intend on playing in church worship services. To explain what I mean by those statements, this book has a great explanation of some basic chord theory and chord harmony in major/minor keys, and shows how to put together the most commonly-used chord progressions that you will find for contemporary worship songs.

That being said, ALL of the worship songs in the book are all written by a family member of the author, so I'm willing to bet that neither you nor anyone that you play these songs for has a clue what they sound like. This means that there are no songs that you will learn by using this book, (nope - not even "Awesome God"), that will be immediately useful if you want to play guitar for church. I'm sure that this was done by the author to either promote the family member's abilities as a writer of worship songs, or to simply avoid having to deal with the hassle of copyright licensing and paying royalty fees. But just the same I would have been willing to pay an extra $5 for the book to have songs included that my students would be able to recognize and use immediately. So for now I'm forced to use this book just for the theory and find songs that my students can use that will reinforce what's in the book, which makes me question whether I should just scrap the book altogether and buy a book that I can use by itself.