Basic Blues for Guitar

Rating:
Summary: A Great Introduction to Blues, and Variations
Review: I first bought this book nearly 20 years ago, when I acquired my first electric guitar, and although I've gotten rid of many of my early guitar books, I've always hung on to this one.

Most of the book is devoted to electric guitar technique, but there are some exercises at the beginning for acoustic, and at the end, in the slide guitar section. If you only have an acoustic, and still want to learn blues lead guitar, just replace your wound G string with an unwound G string, so that you can do the bends. Unless your acoustic has a cutaway, you won't be able to play all the exercises with the very high notes, but you can certain play many of them.

This book covers the basics of blues guitar in a thorough fashion. All the exercises use major and minor pentatonic scales, with some variations, but you can do A LOT with them. The exercises range from straight blues, to jazzy blues, to country blues. Sokolow provides notation and recordings for both the leads and the rhythm. I spent many hours practicing his exercises, which are actual breaks, not tedious scale exercises, which you often find in "speed-pickin'" books.

I can't recommend this book enough for beginning guitarists. You'll have a lot of fun with it.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for learning lead breaks
Review: I purchased this book several years ago (when it came with tape instead of CD). I'm somewhat of a novice (intermediate at best) guitar player and wanted to learn how to play lead breaks through the changes. The tab is almost a necessity for me. This book is probably the best source I have found. The tab shows the notes and the tape lets you hear how the breaks should sound and, when you get good enough, you can play through with the tape. Chords, tab, and notation are all shown. I highly recommend this book. Wish I could find one on country guitar as well.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for learning lead breaks
Review: I purchased this book several years ago (when it came with tape instead of CD). I'm somewhat of a novice (intermediate at best) guitar player and wanted to learn how to play lead breaks through the changes. The tab is almost a necessity for me. This book is probably the best source I have found. The tab shows the notes and the tape lets you hear how the breaks should sound and, when you get good enough, you can play through with the tape. Chords, tab, and notation are all shown. I highly recommend this book. Wish I could find one on country guitar as well.

Rating:
Summary: Good but mistitled
Review: This was one of the first books I got when I started playing guitar two years ago. I picked up several things from it, but to tell you the truth, I think the word "Basic" is misleading. At the time, when I was just starting out, most of the stuff in the book was MUCH too hard for me. He went from strumming I-IV-V chords straight into some fairly difficult stuff that just left me feeling frustrated and helpless. Since then, I've gone back to it several times, and sure, now I can pick things up more easily. But I'm an intermediate player now, with a boatload of hours playing fingerpicking stuff. So I think the book is mistitled. It would have been better if it had progressed more slowly from super-easy to intermediate.

And although it's good, I've found even more success with other books. Still, there is no question that most players with some experience under their belts can pick up some tricks from this book. Incidentally, Fred has another book on slide guitar (with two CD's) that is just plain flat-out excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Good but mistitled
Review: This was one of the first books I got when I started playing guitar two years ago. I picked up several things from it, but to tell you the truth, I think the word "Basic" is misleading. At the time, when I was just starting out, most of the stuff in the book was MUCH too hard for me. He went from strumming I-IV-V chords straight into some fairly difficult stuff that just left me feeling frustrated and helpless. Since then, I've gone back to it several times, and sure, now I can pick things up more easily. But I'm an intermediate player now, with a boatload of hours playing fingerpicking stuff. So I think the book is mistitled. It would have been better if it had progressed more slowly from super-easy to intermediate.

And although it's good, I've found even more success with other books. Still, there is no question that most players with some experience under their belts can pick up some tricks from this book. Incidentally, Fred has another book on slide guitar (with two CD's) that is just plain flat-out excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Good but mistitled
Review: This was one of the first books I got when I started playing guitar two years ago. I picked up several things from it, but to tell you the truth, I think the word "Basic" is misleading. At the time, when I was just starting out, most of the stuff in the book was MUCH too hard for me. He went from strumming I-IV-V chords straight into some fairly difficult stuff that just left me feeling frustrated and helpless. Since then, I've gone back to it several times, and sure, now I can pick things up more easily. But I'm an intermediate player now, with a boatload of hours playing fingerpicking stuff. So I think the book is mistitled. It would have been better if it had progressed more slowly from super-easy to intermediate.

And although it's good, I've found even more success with other books. Still, there is no question that most players with some experience under their belts can pick up some tricks from this book. Incidentally, Fred has another book on slide guitar (with two CD's) that is just plain flat-out excellent.