Recorder Duets from the Beginning - Book 1

I'm an elementary school music teacher, and I bought this thinking it might be a nice addition for my beginning recorder students, based on the title. It is unfortunately, NOT for absolute beginners; players must have at least an octave at their command before they can approach even the first duet. Better for intermediate players.

I own most of the variations of Recorder from the beginning in this series. It's best to pay a little more for the CD version of each book. Children also love the colour versions.The books are graded. I'm not totally convinced that the music at the latter part of Book 3 is still 'beginner' level. The duets book one you would imagine would match up with Beginner book one content,but conceived as duets. It doesn't. This book is more targeted to those players who have all but mastered Beginner Book Two.

I was expecting the pieces in the book to be a bit more graded as you went through, but they seem to be all a fairly similar difficulty - at least the early ones. Also, I thought from the marketing that it would be suitable for my daughter while she was still in Book 1 of the Recorder from the Beginning series, but that's not the case - we had to wait for her to get almost to the end of Book 1 before she was ready for them.

I find it ideal for playing duets with my grand daughter who is just beginning to play the descant recorder; simple and easily understood arrangements even for those smaller hands.

Very good- tunes get harder as they go on and the duets sound great! I would recommend doing at least book 1 of the 'recorder from the beginning' series before this though as it assumes you have this amount of knowledge. Will be buying books 2 and 3!

This book has duets are an increasing level of difficulty and has proved useful for the 7-10 year olds I teach.