Flatpicking Guitar Masterpieces: Acoustic Guitar Cd Songbook

Rating:
Summary: Excellent advanced book
Review: A keyboard player I use to play with had an expression. Every time we'd comment about how difficult the music we were trying to play was hed say "Yeah, but when you can finaly play it, think how good you'll be!" That's how this book will make you feel.

The material here is all advanced. It's amazing to me that a Doc Watson tune is the easiest one in the book. You'll need to spend some serious practice time on this book, but once you do you'll open up your technique to a lot of new areas. This really is a good thing, there's tons of books out there for beginning players, but not nearly as many for the advanced musician. It's nice to see high quality materials at the upper end of the skill levels as well.

The CD is excellent and is worth listening to on it's own. The 12 songs on the CD are the actual recordings off of the artist's original album. I like to let the CD play while I drive so I can get the feel of the tune memorized before I start to learn it.

The tunes themselves tend towards the bluegrass end of things, although Tony Rice's tune has very much a jazz feel to it (it is, in fact, a Wes Montgomery song) and Russ Barenburg's song is more "Adult Contemporary". Everything else is pretty much foot stompin' bluegrass. Any one of those songs would be a great choice in a guitar contest at a bluegrass festival. Even if you don't learn teh entire song you'll still pick up a lot of cool riffs that you can add to your own solos.

If you're looking for a challenge and you're ready to work then you'll get a lot out of this book. And once you can play one or two of these songs, "Think how good you'll be."

Rating:
Summary: Excellent advanced book
Review: A keyboard player I use to play with had an expression. Every time we'd comment about how difficult the music we were trying to play was hed say "Yeah, but when you can finaly play it, think how good you'll be!" That's how this book will make you feel.

The material here is all advanced. It's amazing to me that a Doc Watson tune is the easiest one in the book. You'll need to spend some serious practice time on this book, but once you do you'll open up your technique to a lot of new areas. This really is a good thing, there's tons of books out there for beginning players, but not nearly as many for the advanced musician. It's nice to see high quality materials at the upper end of the skill levels as well.

The CD is excellent and is worth listening to on it's own. The 12 songs on the CD are the actual recordings off of the artist's original album. I like to let the CD play while I drive so I can get the feel of the tune memorized before I start to learn it.

The tunes themselves tend towards the bluegrass end of things, although Tony Rice's tune has very much a jazz feel to it (it is, in fact, a Wes Montgomery song) and Russ Barenburg's song is more "Adult Contemporary". Everything else is pretty much foot stompin' bluegrass. Any one of those songs would be a great choice in a guitar contest at a bluegrass festival. Even if you don't learn teh entire song you'll still pick up a lot of cool riffs that you can add to your own solos.

If you're looking for a challenge and you're ready to work then you'll get a lot out of this book. And once you can play one or two of these songs, "Think how good you'll be."

Rating:
Summary: Very good book for learning impressive songs.
Review: This book/CD consists of 12 songs, including some very fast picking tunes. It has musical notation and tab. I don't read music, so I used the tablature. I found that the tablature was extremely accurate, even on the fastest songs. The intros are well written and the book is a pleasure to use. I have to use the record and slow-down feature of my Korg Pandora to slowly make my way through the blinding speed of some tunes, but in the end it's worth it. If you can learn these songs you'll sound way better than you are! In short, if you wish to learn any of the songs included, there couldn't be a better book because of the accuracy, but you'll need something to slow down the speed while keeping the pitch the same, unless you're God.