Best of Led Zeppelin Drums

Rating:
Summary: Good Capture of Led Zeppelin Drums with some flaws
Review: I am a great fan of John Bonham and Led Zeppelin. I always wanted to see how to play the songs besides looking at flawed tabs. If you are a drummer and are a fan of Led Zeppelin or John Bonham then you should buy this book. The only problem is that you might have a hard time following some of the songs because they do not explain any of the techniques. This gets a little frustrating when you are trying to play it. But other then that its a great book. I hope they come out with another one of other songs because I was disappointed to see that there werent some really good songs in there.

Rating:
Summary: Good Capture of Led Zeppelin Drums with some flaws
Review: I am a great fan of John Bonham and Led Zeppelin. I always wanted to see how to play the songs besides looking at flawed tabs. If you are a drummer and are a fan of Led Zeppelin or John Bonham then you should buy this book. The only problem is that you might have a hard time following some of the songs because they do not explain any of the techniques. This gets a little frustrating when you are trying to play it. But other then that its a great book. I hope they come out with another one of other songs because I was disappointed to see that there werent some really good songs in there.

Rating:
Summary: great only about 2 wrong notes
Review: I really liked it just in stairway to heaven there is 1 wrong note and in the other songs there's probrably some wrong notes lurking around there but otherwise this book is great!

Rating:
Summary: Marginally Helpful, but Disappointing
Review: This book is an OK resource, but I have to agree with a previous reviewer that has some mistakes and is sometimes as flawed as the tabs available on the Internet. Additionally, the book doesn't even follow its own drum legend (the notation is inconsistent throughout the book).

If you go strictly by the presented legend in the beginning of the book, then John Bohnham never plays his bass drum in "Good Times, Bad Times". Instead, he uses his floor tom. I guess he would cross over his body with his left hand while playing 8ths on the hi-hat with his right hand or ride on the hat with his left and play the tom with his right? - probably not.

In "Stairway to Heaven" the same problem arises with the bass drum notation using the tom line as specified in the legend, except there are notes for the bass drum as specified in the legend. OK, so John Bonham played 4-on-the-floor in his tom with occasional bass drum accents on the upbeats? This is a professional transcription?

This book is a sloppy presentation of Bonham's playing. Of course, a person can decipher what's going on in the book, but I think if I have to do that much deciphering, I should do it from the recording, not from a marginally correct paper representation of someone's playing. With that said, I will rely on my own transcriptions and ear rather than this book. There is no other way.

I think this book is inexpensive, especially if you pick it up used, so it's not a bad thing to have. The best way I can come up with using it myself is after I've transcribed something and before I go to the kit to play it. I'll just check with the book in case it might have something in it that I can correct or something glaring that I missed. However, I'd use the recording as a final word when the book and a personal transcription don't match because I can't trust the book to be correct.

Using a transcription tool like the program Transcribe (www.seventhstring.com - runs on Mac, Linux, and PC) to slow down and repeat pieces of music, I think a person can come up with more useful transcriptions of Bonham's music than this book offers.

Buy it if you want to, but don't pay full price and don't take it too seriously.