Customer Reviews

Adrian Legg - Pickin' 'n' Squintin': A Collection of 12 Fingerstyle Guitar Solos

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This an exceptional portfolio for new age guitar,it has turned me on to new open tunings and more importantly, a different approach to fingerstyle guitar. I am from the Leo Kottke/John Fahey school of guitar playing, it was time for a change! I also have been studying classical and hawaiian slack key guitar with good results. Adrian Legg seems to be nice and down to earth, and explains his pieces well. He states that you could e-mail him with any questions. I plan to purchase more books by him, I give this my hightest rating along with past publications from Leo Kottke,John Fahey,and Christopher Parkening.

If you've been awed by Adrian Legg's recordings, and assumed it was way over your head, you may be wrong. Legg uses a lot of 'cheats', like altered tunings and weird capo arrangements, not to mention the banjo tuners he uses to retune on the fly. If you're an intermediate to advanced fingerstyle guitarist, these tunes are certainly within your grasp with a little hard work. A good companion to this is How to Cheat at Guitar, a DVD by Legg that plainly shows how to accomplish some of the impossible sounding things he does.

I fell in love with Cogings Glory and Nanci from Guitar for Mortals, and was very surprised to learn that they're pretty easy once you know the alternate tunings. Cogings Glory can mostly be done with the index and ring fingers of the left hand, and the pinky is shunned entirely. I was somewhat confounded by the meter of the intro to this tune, since it makes perfect sense to hear it all in 4/4, and I always have. Still, the transcription played as written is accurate. In fact, I haven't found anything in any of the transcriptions that would qualify as an error, which is pretty amazing for a fingerstyle guitar book.

I highly recommend this collection.