Customer Reviews

Acoustic Masterclass: Contemporary Christmas Guitar (Book & CD)

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I believe I may be the less-than-proud owner of every Christmas guitar book (tab, sheet, and "other") available on Amazon and most of them made great Yule-tide kindling. This book (Contemporary Christmas Guitar), however, stands well above and beyond the rest in both content and quality of performance in the accompanying CD. If you were going to purchase one fingerstyle guitar book for holiday music, this is it. Even if you do not play guitar, the CD alone is worth the purhcase price. The only complaint I have is I only get to play it one season a year.

The book is designed for an intermediate fingerstyle player and will most likely still require ample dedicated practice time before songs are ready to perform for the holidays (read - buy this in the summer or early fall so you have time to learn the music). The songs are meticulously tabbed to the music on the CD and there are no songs on the CD that are not in the book.

The songs have the varied styles of the three greats that play them. David Cullen transforms songs into fluid and syncopated winter wonder, Doug Smith picks past dexterity and pushes beyond what six strings should allow, and Laurence Juber does, as always, an unparallel conversion of a basic song and melody into a music miracle of technically apt fingerings and lyrical beauty.

Happy Pickin'