Mandolin Primer Book for Beginners Deluxe Edition with DVD and 2 Jam CDs

As a mandolin teacher I was hopeful this would be an easy and slow approach. It is neither. It may be an ok supplementary book for a later beginner. It is not a primer, before level one book. Disappointing.

Picked this up as a gift for my internet averse father. Read reviews, and one mentioned a DVD, but this one indicated it is Video and Audio Access. The audio can be downloaded. Sadly, the video cannot. Somewhere on the cover, or in the description it should state that while the audio can be downloaded, the video requires an active internet connection to view. There doesn't appear to be an option to request a disk.UPDATE: I reached out to the manufacturer, and they came up with a download solution. I still hope they update the package with accurate information.

this is a excellent beginner book. It gives you both tab and scored music so you can learn to read music which is a real plusExplanations in the back of the book are clear and easy to understand. The skill sets build one on the next and provide you somegood beginning tunes most blue grass people know so you can join in with others right away. Cd's are also great learning tool.

"Don't always use books to learn to play instruments, but this one comes with disks to make the words and pictures mean something. So between this excellent manual, VD's, and YouTube am doing quite well. Instructors are hard to find in the real world along with real pickers too...it would seem."

This is an excellent first book for aspiring mandolin players. It doesn't assume or require any preexisting knowledge of the instrument or musical notation since, as pointed out by a prior reviewer, it provides visual scores or tablature of finger placement. The book also provides very helpful practical tips on such things as tuning, recommending, for example, the purchase of an inexpensive electronic tuner. I followed that advice and bought a Korg CA-30 and used it not only to successfully tune the mandolin but also my guitar which I had for years previously tuned "by ear" with varying degrees of success. Mr. Casey is also straight-forward in making it clear that learning the Mandolin takes a lot of practice and, at least until you develop some callouses on your finger tips, sometime painful practice. However, if you are diligent in following his lesson plans, you will learn to play the mandolin to an extent that will amaze not only your friends but yourself.

This Primer teaches you 4 major scales then immediately uses these in tunes to reinforce the scale concepts. The song collection is very good, mostly BlueGrass type tunes. I liked the 3 speeds for each of the songs with the final version of each having guitar and rhythm mandolin at full tempo so you can really hear what the tunes should sound like if you were playing with a band. The book has a lot of material crammed into 50 pages and the 74 CD tracks are really nice to hear what you should sound like. Recommend this book with CD for beginners and even intermediate mandolin players.Ed C. Fort Worth, TX

This is a good way to begin to learn to play the mandolin!

Incredible impressed... one of the best instrument primers I’ve seen.