Customer Reviews

Mel Bays Complete Book of Harmony Theory and Voicing

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This is an extremely dense book, which covers modern advanced jazz harmony. The voicings are based on the "drop 2" concept, which takes the 2nd note from the top in a closed voicing and drops it an octave down. We are instructed to play these voicings on the middle four strings of the guitar, to avoid ambiguity in terms of fingerings. Given these precepts, the author deems it sufficient to only notate the top note of each voicing. That means one has to figure out the rest of the notes to be played from the chord symbol. Since the voicing is already specified as drop 2, there is only one correct way of playing the chord. But it's a lot of work compared to working through books with chord diagrams! I think it's part of the point that you have to put in quite a bit of effort to work your way through this. Particularly for guys looking to improve their "session chops", I can imagine this book would be a nice woodshedding tool. Personally, I found it a bit too heavy-going. Working through 8 bars of chord progressions took me over 30 minutes, and apart from finding that the progression sounded rather like a Zawinul composition, I can't really imagine I'll get much use for a load of maj7#5 and 7sus4 substitutions...

In short, it seems to be a great book for serious jazz guitarists. For those simply looking to get a little more jazzy flavour in their chord repertoire, this is probably not the place to start.

The title is well chosen : this book lists all the possible chords on the 4 middle strings, starting from the different inversions of C7M, then altering those to C7, Cm7, C7b5#9, etc. Of course altering one chord can make it a substitute one for an other (and vice-versa), so through all the books the chords are grouped by their alterations and the corresponding substitutions. There are some musical examples (all written, don't expect any tablature here !) to show their possible uses, and some pages on parallel voicings. Voice-leading is used all through the book.

The author advices to do the same work on other groups of strings (1-4, 3-6), but as the book is very dense, you'll need to order another whole life to do so !

IMO, this is a nice book, usable to get some ideas, to practice chord reading, to get other substitution chords, but which shouldn't be practiced alone, expecting to become a great jazz player. Its exhaustivity makes it very indigest and far from the way one should learn music, even if (I repeat) there are some great ideas and views. I'm still amazed by the huge work Wilmott accomplished here !

I wouldn't advice it for beginners, but if you're a music geek, why not ? ;)

this is the work of an obvious GENIUS. i never heard the man play but he sure can open up the concepts like no other. MINDBLOWING WORK OF ART is what i call it. it has helped me a lot though i think i'll take a few years to fully assimilate the book. non of that bullshit play jazz guitar in 3 weeks nonsense you see in other books. this is THE MOMMA!