Customer Reviews

Mel Bay's Blues Lead Guitar Method

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I bought this book many, many years ago and never used it. I found all the diagrams of guitar necks covered with dots intimidating. How would I memorize all those dots all over the neck -- and then memorize another 11 sets of dots to cover all the keys? What IS playing "horizontally" versus "vertically" (the purpose for which is never divulged by Mr. Griffin)? Well, years later, after having learned a good deal about the guitar, I can say that learning the neck is NOWHERE as difficult and arcane as the haphazard, poorly-explained method in this book made it seem to me as a beginner.

Any beginner could be seriously confused and misled by this book. To begin with, there are five main pentatonic minor shapes universally used in blues and rock playing; Steve Griffin only shows four. Vibrato and bending are only given the briefest token explanation. Indeed, with only this book to go by, a beginner would have no clue as to which particular notes in a scale SHOULD be bent and to what degree they should be bent -- even the purpose of bending would remain a mystery. This subject is covered explicitly in Arlen Roth's "Complete Electric Guitar," by far a better book than this. The bulk of the book is filled up with guitar neck diagrams showing the same patterns moved up a fret at a time for all 12 keys. Showing the patterns in tablature would have saved space and maybe allowed for some basics regarding theory.
If you're dying to learn, and have any curiousity regarding scales, technique, or theory, anything by Arlen Roth or Fred Sokolow is infinitely better than what you'll find in this book.

I've been playing guitar close to 7 years now and I was given this book and I'm glad that I played through it. It's a really easy book to play through for someone that hasn't been playing guitar long or someone that has not been familiar with playing Blues guitar. It introduces the Pentatonic Scale and gives a few different short solos using it, adding different techniques with each song. It also gives you a fret board layout of each key signature and how to play the blues scale in that key. I really enjoyed playing and studying from this book. My only complaint is it doesn't explain very well how the scales fit into the key signatures, it just shows you on the fret board as opposed to telling you the root of every scale. It talks about "key tones" but doesn't tell you how that fits into your key signature. Overall, it is a very good guitar method book and I would recommend it to any fellow guitar player.