Andre Pires Costa
Bergmann Edition: 64 pages
Costa is a Portuguese composer/performer who has his hands in Jazz, Pop, and World Music as well as Classical. Here he decided to write some studies aimed specifically at his pupils, with each piece having a particular technical problem.
Therefore, to give you a few examples, there is Give Me Five, which unsurprisingly is an exercise in 5ths, Electric Flea which being in octaves throughout jumps around as the title suggests, Bar Caviar, which is mostly in Bars and is in two voices and full of offbeat rhythms too, and Stretch The Sketch which has lots of slurs, hammer – ons and pull – offs in all sorts of situations.
The others are just as useful and as fixed on sorting out their technical problems and moreover are full of very interesting ideas, and pleasant music. Mind you, they are not too easy, so if you do have some problems in certain areas of guitar playing, they will definitely test yo0u, but in the end will sort you out as well.
So all in all, this is a very useful set of study pieces that I can see will be very effective and give players a full and busy time trying to get them mastered.
Chris Dumigan
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