Ed Gerhard: The Guitar Songbook (Book & CD)

Rating:
Summary: Consider your goals before buying
Review: I learned Gerhard's version of "The Water is Wide" from an old Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine article, and was thrilled to discover this book. But here's what I found out when it arrived: (a) The CD that accompanies the book has almost no music on it. It is mostly a tutorial to help you with certain snarky technical issues in the individual pieces. Nothing wrong with that, but not helpful if you haven't heard the pieces and would like to know what you're working on in advance. (b) A couple of the pieces are written for use with a slide. (c) Most of the pieces require an unusual tuning. Dropped D tuning is not a big deal, but most of the others are more complicated than that. I wanted this music for performance purposes, and having to stop and tune extensively between pieces makes their use extremely inconvenient. If you know all this and still want the book, it's easy to read and contains both tablature and music notation. Gerhard's work is terrific. But if I had it to do over, I would have passed, based on the above limitations.