Customer Reviews

Best of The Beatles for Acoustic Guitar (Guitar Signature Licks)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have other guitar instruction books by Wolf Marshall but I have to say this one is the best. Unfortuanely Amazon does not list the songs included so I will: Across The Universe*And I Love Her*Blackbird*Girl*Her Majesty*Here Comes The Sun*Hey Jude*I Will*I'm Looking Through You*I've Just Seen A Face*Julia*Long Long Long*Lovely Rita*Mother Nature's Son*Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)*Revolution 1*Rocky Raccoon*Till There Was You*
Two Of Us*Yesterday*You've Got To Hide Your Love Away*
I love most of these songs and I learned to play "You've Got To Hide..." perfectly and that song alone was worth the price of the book. What I like about the Wolf Marshall books is that he plays the guitar part of the song at regular tempo and then at a slow tempo for practicing (on the CD). I find this is very helpful for someone (like me) who does not pick up a song easily. Another little nice tidbit that he provides is the paragraph or 2 at the begining of each song which gives some interesting insight or background on the song along with a description of what guitars/amps were used and who played what part (John, George etc.). All in all I found it to be a very fun and helpful book.

This is the book to get if your looking for everything about how to play 21 songs made by the most influential rock band ever. This book includes the right chords for all the songs and tells you how to strum them, gives you the notes for whether you want to play lead guitar(george) or acoustic guitar(john) with tablatures, and comes with a CD which plays and explains each of the songs for you. On the CD, Wolf Marshall plays the songs normally for you and then plays it slowy for you to make sure your playing the songs right. This book gives you the authentic notes of which the beatles created and preformed with.

This book is not meant to be a collection of solo acoustic guitar arrangments. Instead, this book provides complete and accurate transcriptions of all the guitar parts for each of the beatles original acoustic recordings. Since the beatles used a rhythm (John) and a lead (George) guitar there are two guitar transcriptions for most of the tunes. One exception is Blackbird, which is all Paul. In most cases you will need to merge the two to come up with your own solo arrangement, Wolf provides you with very accurate transciptions making this fairly easy to do.

I got this book because it is the only one which provides a guitar transcription for the Beatles cover of Til There Was You. The transcription of this tune is perfect. I play Johns part to accompany a singer and then take George's break as an interlude. Note, on the original recording on With the Beatles they play in F, which is the key Wolf transcriped to. On the Ed Sullivan show their instruments are tuned down to Eb so they play this tune in E on that peformance, even though they use the same chords.

(First, before I give my review, I just can't resist saying how stupid a previous reviewer was for giving this book bad reviews because it's not written for "solo" guitar -- I mean, no where in the title or description of the book are the words "arranged for solo guitar" -- there are other Beatle's tab books on Amazon that ARE arranged for solo guitar and say so explicitly in the title. Okay, sorry for the discourse here, but I just couldn't ignore such ignorance)

The Wolf man has a great book here because he chose the tunes for their varied acoustic styles of playing. I have the Complete Beatles and have been using it to learn alot of lead and fill lines to incorporate into the band I play with. But since I just play lead, fill, and chord progressions, I'm never able to sit down and just play the guitar while I sing a song all the way through -- when I do play the songs I play with the band by themselves, it's just playing cool sounds, not actually a "song" -- it's just bits of fills, riffs, leads, and chord vamps. So my goal was to get this book, learn every song in it and because it DOES contain both guitars parts, it gives you the choice to write your own arrangements when you do sing and play without a band.

The Wolf gives great anaylyses of the songs as he breaks down all the elements of the song, e.g., he'll describe that when guitar II plays on the bridge it's doing some country styled riffs, or guitar I for the intro borrows from a jazz style motif, etc... you get the idea. And the cd is excellently produced and recorded, you get the parts played at two speeds and the best part is all the other instruments are very accurately recorded on the left channel and the guitar on the right -- very cool! Want to see how well you have learned these parts? Just switch the balance all the way to the left channel and play along with the band -- what a great challenge.

I learned and memorized "Black Bird" in one sitting -- guitar friends of mine had always told me it was an easy song to learn, but I had no idea how easy! Right now, I'm trying to learn "Julia" -- while conceptually a very simple song, since I've been playing electric lead, my finger picking has gotten very sloppy -- I'm determined to discipline myself to stick exactly to the Travis style picking they show in the book to hone my finger picking skills.

My only gripe with the book, and I was originally going to give it only four stars for this, is that Wolf didn't include "Michelle", but I soon learned by surfing around on Amazon that Wolf has two other Beatle's books out and it's included on one of those -- so, what you have here is a little sublime marketing going on. To add insult injury, he included in this book, "Rocky Racoon" which has got to be the simplist Beatle guitar part. But as I thought about it, that's what makes this book cool, it can actually be used as a "learing to play guitar with the Beatles" If I ever decide to teach, I'll use this book -- it's got very beginner to more advanced stuff.

As you can tell I highly recommend this book on all levels, but since there are so many Beatle's experts out there, I have to point out that I'm suspect to some of the transcriptions because many of the songs involve the use of a capo. I checked "The Beatles - Complete Scores" and some of the same titles in there do not use a capo. I've also heard that the Beatle's rarely used a capo -- to be honest I simply don't know what the truth is -- still, the transcriptions sound correct to me, then again, I haven't sat down anaylzing these particular titles against the record -- and without being able to separate the guitar parts out of the mix, I don't know if I'd be able to tell whether a capo was being used or not.

Okay, I've rambled on enough, let me get back to perfecting "Julia!" Cheers!

Buy this book if you're in a band and want to learn Beatle music. But none of the arrangements are for solo guitar--they are for 2 or three guitars and a vocalist. Buy the Beekman or Washington books if you want good solo guitar arrangements.

Ok, Wolf Marshall put a lot into this book. However, The Beatles Acoustic Guitar(recorded series) also from Hal Leonard(and Wolf Marshall?) is nearly identical and contains complete transcriptions. In the "Best of" book, we get rhythmic figures that we must link up with the recordings. It is very helpful to have the cd that comes with this book to do slowed down as well as actual tempo play alongs. But, my main criticism of this book, and this is not specific to this book, is the refusal to acknowledge the function of the capo in musical notation and the tab.
For those of you who hate the capo and don't use it, tough luck. The Beatles used it and it is essential to getting the right sound out of their instruments. My point is this: On a song such as "Norwegian Wood", it is more useful, I believe, to show the tab and music in the actual GUITAR key that it is played in, rather than actual music notation. The capo is used primarily as a way of preserving the open position sound(i.e. percussive) of the guitar so that it can be matched to the best key for the singer. In "Norwegian Wood", the guitar part is played out of a "D" position. Yet the resultant tab and musical notation is written as if you we're actually playing in "E". The actual key but not the guitar key. That's because the capo is placed on the second fret so that the singer can execute a guitar part invented in the key of "D" but better sung in the key of E".
When you use a capo, you are essentially shortening the neck to create a new open position., thus the the notation and tab would be clearer if it reflected the actual chord formations you would use. For example. The song "Norwegian Wood" starts out on a "D" chord, there fore the tab should show this as 0(5) 0(4) 2(3) 3(2) 2(1): thus showing what the open strings are(5 & 4) and allowing the player to see what the actual chord formation is. Then just say, capo on the second fret. I stongly believe this would be clearer and I encourage Hal Leonard and all music publishers to consider changing their notation and tab formats to embrace the actual "played key" of a song rather than the "pitch"key of the song. To emphasize what I'm talking about,"Julia" is done exactly the way I'm talking about, as is "Here Comes The Sun". For "Julia",the tab and music are shown in the key of C, which is how it is played, but, you must capo on the 2nd fret to get the same sound('actual key of D major) as John Lennon does when you try and play along. For "Here Comes The Sun", the transcription is in D, where it is played, but capoed on the 7th fret to get the same sound as when George plays it. Why do it for these and not the others? Other than this, it is a great book.

This is a good book. It is worth the money. It examines the Beatle's guitar styles and show's the reader how to reproduce that style authentically.
You will have fun with this book and pick up a few tips.

I almost gave up on finding a good, easy to use chordbook for Beatles music until I bought this one. Even though there are a lot of funky chords in here, each chord in the song is included at the top of the songsheet, making for easy reference. The result is amazing == I have never played Beatles' songs that sounnded as close to the original. This book is a winner.

Excellent spot-on transcriptions of the songs. The accompaning CD is quite good and very useful in helping learn some of the more complicated parts of the songs.

I agree with the reviewer who mentioned the fact that "Norwegian Wood" is oddly tabbed in the key of E instead of D. Must have been transcribed by a piano player. A guitarist would never do that. It just needlessly confuses the issue. That being said, I like the book and find it to be useful in learning the tunes. I don't care to learn some of the songs in the book and wish it had others more to my liking but still worth the money.