The Fiddler's Fakebook

Rating:
Summary: Good Book for new Fiddlers who can read musical notation
Review: We chose this book to be the standard for our Jam session in PRovidence because it has good versions of many popular old-timey, bluegrass and celtic tunes. Most of the session players around here play in several styles. This book has versions of 500 tunes taken from authentic sources, and most of the versions are pretty similar to what you will hear in the local sessions, so you can learn tunes from the book and be pretty certain that you will be able to play along when you hear the tune at the festival, in the bar or wherever. The author listed record or CD sources that you can get to listen to the tunes, so you can check the notation against the playing of well-known musicians such as Tommy Jarrell, Bob Wills, etc. The tunes are arranged alphabetically, so it is always easy to find what you want. This is a very useful and well-done book.

Rating:
Summary: A must-have for beginning and intermediate players
Review: When I first started playing the fiddle seriously about eight or 10 years ago (after several years of tinkering) a friend in a local contra dance band showed me his copy of The Fiddler's Fakebook. Though I was a marginal music reader at best, I decided to buy one. It was the best music investment I ever made. Because I've never completely decided whether I wanted to be a Celtic, old-time or "other" fiddler, this book was the perfect match. Over the years I have learned dozens of tunes from it - perhaps 30 percent of my repertoire. Now as a semi-professional player in a Celtic band, as well as a contra dance band, I continue to use it to learn tunes. One of the few drawbacks of this book is that many of the tunes are odd-ball transcriptions, quite different than many people play them, at least in this part of the country. Some are over-simplified, but if one uses them to learn the basic tune and then relies on listening to recordings or other players for variations and style, one can still benefit greatly from the Fakebook version. I would recommend any fiddler have this in his or her collection.