William Leavitt
A Modern Method for Guitar vols. 1, 2 & 3
Reviewed

This method, published for the first time in 1966 by Berklee Press Publications, is a practice-focused, well-thought-of collection of sight reading exercises. They are arranged in progressive order, from very easy, to very hard, covering rhythmic, melodic and harmonic problems quite thoroughly. The musical examples, though not exciting in themselves, serve their purpose well enough.

Interspersed with the exercises there is an attempt at a system to memorize the fretboard using two octave fingering patterns for scales. This method, as other similar ones are, is not only very boring to study, but not practical in that it doesn't get to the bottom of things and really explain how the fretboard works. It requires an excessive amount of rote study and does not provide deep understanding.

Moreover, the musical examples have fingerings -for the most part- which is not ideal given the author's intention that the books should serve as a sight reading method. However, they are well worth your bucks if you can learn to ignore the suggested fingerings and stick to the notes. There are few such large collections of quality reading material available.

It also contains numerous scale and arpeggio exercises and includes audio (in some editions).

William G. Leavitt wrote other books, such as Melodic Rhythms for Guitar, Advanced Reading Studies for Guitar (in two volumes), and Classical Studies for Pick-Style Guitar, which you will soon find reviewed here.

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