About the author
Hugh Boyde has taught guitar and ukulele in schools in Cambridgshire, UK, for nearly thirty years. He has taught all ages, but has increasingly specialised in the primary school age range. He performs semi-professionally on jazz guitar and mandolin (and yes occasionally ukulele) in a variety of bands.
He always has a number of teaching and playing projects on the boil – click below to find out what he is currently up to.
About the books
Hugh is a strong believer in younger pupils learning to read standard musical notation at the same time as they learn their instruments. Of all the thousands of guitar and ukulele tutor books, there are rather few which teach this skill well. He felt there was a place for a series of books which on the one hand use exclusively stave notation (yes this is a TAB-free zone!), but on the other hand make the stave a friendly place, and make it fun to learn.
They are aimed at any guitar or ukulele pupil who would like to learn to read from the stave at the same time as learning to play the instrument. The gentle learning pace, and the colour-string notation, make the books particularly suitable for young beginners. But they could be equally useful for an older learner, who has perhaps learned guitar from tablature and chord diagrams, and would now like to explore the stave without getting overwhelmed.
The Rainbow books got their name because they are based on a colour-string system. Each guitar or ukulele string is given a colour, and the notes on that string appear in that same colour, all the way through the books.
- The colours immediately guide you to the right string.
- At the beginning, they do almost all the reading for you! (because you only know one note on each string)
- As you progress, you start to look at the stave more closely (because you will need to distinguish several notes on each string).
- At every stage, the colours divide the stave into zones which your eye can quickly focus on.
- The more notes you learn, the more closely you will have to look at the lines and spaces on the stave.
- Later, as you move on to reading without colours, you will find you have painlessly learned far more than you realised!