Barna Kováts (1920-2005) was a guitarist, teacher, and composer, whose work prepared the way for the teachers and performers considered to be the founders of guitar teaching in Hungary, and who gave it an institutional presence, including László Szendrey-Karper. Kováts himself was mostly self-taught, and his greatest model was Andrés Segovia, whom he heard in a concert at the Budapest Music Academy in 1937. From the beginning, his aim was to have the guitar recognized as an artistic, classical music instrument, and to create the framework for quality education. For this, there needed to be a suitable repertoire, so he researched the works of nineteenth-century virtuosos, and masters of the Baroque and Renaissance, making transcriptions of their works, and composing his own pieces. After occasional jobs in radio and the theatre, he became a staff member of the National Puppet Theatre, thus making him Hungary's first full-time guitarist. In the 1950s as a teacher of the Budapest Music School Organization, he also took part in developing institutional guitar education. In 1956 he emigrated, putting an end to his activities in Hungary, but his compositions were published in several countries, including Hungary.

In 1980-81 Editio Musica Budapest published the two-volume Short Studies for Guitar, enriching the repertoire of pieces available to learners for pedagogical purposes and for performance. As the title suggests, the two publications are a collection of short pieces. As a composer, Kováts had an affinity for the 'musica nova' trend, and in his pieces written in this vein he aimed to compress as much as possible into a brief piece.

These two volumes can be used from the fourth to the sixth years of learning the guitar.