Customer Reviews

Acoustic Classics: Guitar Play-Along Volume 33

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This volume, like the others in the series, is mainly chord strumming. There are a couple of pieces for which single notes, and embellished and partial chords are used. These arrangements are worthwhile, but the majority are pretty shallow and best for comping. When you play them, the song may be recognizable, but it won't be melodically complete.
One problem that is common to so many of this type of CD accompanied books, is that the guitar part in never offered in complete isolation. Percussion and other musical support sounds fine for listening, but to best learn the piece, a clean solo would be more helpful. I think the percussion, etc. is included to mask that weak arrangements of the strumming songs.

I have many of the HL Play along series and the other reviewer is dead on.
It would help to be able to ISOLATE the instrument you are trying to learn. This USED to be THE way publishers did play alongs back when there were cassettes and floppy albums included, for some reason they got away from it, maybe because many CD player/Boom boxes do not have the ability to pan left to right. I so miss this feature. I do like the "slow down" feature, but you need to have your computer handy.
Also the arrangements in these books are either TOO sparce (if you get the EASY playalong series or EASY POP series..they don't even tell you how to strum) or TOO complex(too much detail...take 5 pages to play a song show every little
note of each chord). I sure wish there was a intermediate version of these songs that gave you "some" of the important riffs and strum patterns without every minor detail, either that or they should give you BOTH the TAB version and the EASY play version in the SAME BOOK!~! So once you learn the details and you just need a little reminder of the chords you can play along with turning 5 pages and straining your eyes!