August & Everything After

Rating:
Summary: Well worth the purchase, but a few things leave me lacking
Review: I bought this book with high expectations. I'd never bought any Counting Crows sheet music before and I was pretty excited about it. I have delt with Hal Leonard before and haven't really had a problem with them. Everything seemed right in place, but there were two annoyances that stuck out to me.

The first is that the songs in the book do not follow the order of the CD, making it difficult to flip through the book when the tracks change, unless you want to program your CD player to follow the order in the book. This can be a big or moderate flaw, depening on how you want to look at it.

The other problem I encountered was when I was trying to play "A Murder of One". Now, I know my guitar and piano skills aren't great, but I was sure that I wasn't THIS bad. After I listened to the recording and followed along in the music, I realized that while the song is in the key of F#, it is written musically in the book as the key of F. That's fine to do, since F is a lot easier than F#, but they could at least include a note that says "Music transcribed from F# to F to make playing less difficult". They've done this for other artist's music (such as Sarah McLochlan) to make playing easier, especially when they're in wierd and generally unfamiliar keys (F#, Ab, C#, etc.). For those of you who are musicians, you'll understand this.

There's a limit as to how great a book of sheet music can be, but those few things are what keep it from getting 5/5. Regardless, still worth the buy.