Customer Reviews

Basic Blues for Guitar

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I purchased this book several years ago (when it came with tape instead of CD). I'm somewhat of a novice (intermediate at best) guitar player and wanted to learn how to play lead breaks through the changes. The tab is almost a necessity for me. This book is probably the best source I have found. The tab shows the notes and the tape lets you hear how the breaks should sound and, when you get good enough, you can play through with the tape. Chords, tab, and notation are all shown. I highly recommend this book. Wish I could find one on country guitar as well.

This was one of the first books I got when I started playing guitar two years ago. I picked up several things from it, but to tell you the truth, I think the word "Basic" is misleading. At the time, when I was just starting out, most of the stuff in the book was MUCH too hard for me. He went from strumming I-IV-V chords straight into some fairly difficult stuff that just left me feeling frustrated and helpless. Since then, I've gone back to it several times, and sure, now I can pick things up more easily. But I'm an intermediate player now, with a boatload of hours playing fingerpicking stuff. So I think the book is mistitled. It would have been better if it had progressed more slowly from super-easy to intermediate.

And although it's good, I've found even more success with other books. Still, there is no question that most players with some experience under their belts can pick up some tricks from this book. Incidentally, Fred has another book on slide guitar (with two CD's) that is just plain flat-out excellent.

I first bought this book nearly 20 years ago, when I acquired my first electric guitar, and although I've gotten rid of many of my early guitar books, I've always hung on to this one.

Most of the book is devoted to electric guitar technique, but there are some exercises at the beginning for acoustic, and at the end, in the slide guitar section. If you only have an acoustic, and still want to learn blues lead guitar, just replace your wound G string with an unwound G string, so that you can do the bends. Unless your acoustic has a cutaway, you won't be able to play all the exercises with the very high notes, but you can certain play many of them.

This book covers the basics of blues guitar in a thorough fashion. All the exercises use major and minor pentatonic scales, with some variations, but you can do A LOT with them. The exercises range from straight blues, to jazzy blues, to country blues. Sokolow provides notation and recordings for both the leads and the rhythm. I spent many hours practicing his exercises, which are actual breaks, not tedious scale exercises, which you often find in "speed-pickin'" books.

I can't recommend this book enough for beginning guitarists. You'll have a lot of fun with it.

One of the first and most comprehensive blues instruction book-CD packages on the market.

This book / CD has been on the market for several years. It isn't the biggest book, but it is jam packed with blues guitar instruction covering acoustic, electric, slide guitar. Chords and soloing. The book surveys a breadth of styles from traditional to modern and jazzy blues.

The book is accessible to ambitious beginners, yet still offers intermediate to advanced guitarists the opportunity to broaden their blues playing styles and skill.

Check out what others have to say about the book and the author's web site,

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I bought this book back in 1993 when it came with a cassette. It's very good at teaching basic blues and helping you to play something quickly, which is important when you've first started with the guitar. If you're into Chuck Berry, Sokolow does a very good job at getting a player into his style (and by extension, the styles of a lot of other blues guitarists). There's really not any theory here, but I don't think a book for beginning blues needs theory. Sokolow provides a good balance between written instruction and allowing you to develop your ear. A really good book for beginning guitarists who like blues and early rock and roll.

This book is an overview of the dominant genres of blues. It is a good book to begin exploration into the many flavors of blues music. If you want to learn how Robert Johnson or Chuck Berry or Albert King played then this is the beginning. I absolutely disagree with other reviewers about the difficulty and material covered. It is truly a basic blues guitar book and it is not a music theory text nor is it an in-depth dissection of every blues style. It is a book on HOW not WHY. To blame the book for not explaining "why" music does what it does is unfair to the author. To say that it is too difficult insults the author and musicians; nobody cared what Muddy Waters was playing before he was an accomplished guitarist...see what I mean?

If you don't fingerpick, your playing won't match the recording. Never. Fred is a good teacher and great in fingerpicking, but since this is a basic book, he shoud play it straight and be honest to the reader, since there isn't any explanation of how to apply this technique, and you're left wondering why the recording sound so better than your playing no matter how faithful you'll be to the tabs.

That said, you can get good licks and a blues feel from the amount of licks here. That's it, the rest is complicated because:

- scales fingering are lousy explained, there is no indication of which is the root note for example;
- there are no double stops theory explanations, just the basic play here and here;
- there is a good deal of chords that are thrown but no explained.

I was impress with the large content, though. But I wouldn't buy another book of Fred, since they all seen to have this same problem.