Customer Reviews

Bob Dylan Harmonica

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

 

 

This book can be described quite succinctly as a dissapointment. Speaking as someone who has spent hours searching the internet and various music stores for transcriptions of Bob Dylan's distinctly unique and reckless harmonica playing, I can say that this book fails to deliver what the title implies. The harmonica has always been an integral part of Dylan's musical talent and his less than precise playing style is something that any Dylan fan who plays the harp has always desired to emulate. The title of this book implies that the book contains transcriptions of the harmonica parts heard in many of Dylan's greatest songs. This title is indeed misleading, as is the indication that Bob Dylan is the author of this book. Although Dylan has copyrights to the songs presented in this book, the arrangements actually found in the book are attributed to Stephen Jennings, and are anything but the solos that can be heard on actual Bob Dylan albums.

While this book does deliver clear and easy to learn harmonica notation, it reduces Dylan songs to simple melodies, ignoring the harmonica solos that characterize many of Dylan's songs. In addition, the book ignores the fact that Dylan's songs were not all written in the key of C and fails to include lyrics. I recommend that any fan of Dylan's unduplicated harp playing who wishes to find transcriptions of his solos and fills bypass this book and look for other titles, such as The Harp Styles of Bob Dylan, by Amy Appleby, which contains complete transcriptions of twelve Dylan classics.

Even if one only wants to learn to play the melodies of Dylan's songs on the harmonica, I recommend that you by a book containing standard song notation of Dylan's music. You will have a larger collection of songs, and any beginning harmonica instruction book can tell you which notes correspond to which holes, making it easy to learn melodies quickly without the aid of harmonica notation. In short, anyone serious about learning to play the harmonica like Bob Dylan should skip this book and continue the search, and if you have any luck finding a complete collection of transcriptions of Bob Dylan's harp playing, contact me. I'm still searching.

This book contains a transcription of Dylan's melodys not his harmonica solos. Besides that the lyrics were not included making even playing the melodys a challange.

If when searching for this book you typed "Bob Dylan" before you typed "harmonica", this is not the book for you.

It isn't the quality of the book that is at issue -- that seems fine. It's clearly the choices that were made -- most notably the aforementioned decision to transpose all the songs to C. Anyone who wants to learn to play harmonica, even as simply as Dylan does, will probably be willing to buy more than one harmonica -- and changing the keys renders the ability to play along with the records useless.

Changing keys (to make it easy for piano I guess) is a common problem with simple music and tab books. I usually only buy books that say "Authentic Recorded Versions" on them -- and even then I am often disappointed.

A great collection of Dylan songs. The harmonica pieces are easy to understand and are shown in numbers as well as the proper music. The were no words on the sheet music though, so it can be tricky to find out where in the song you are.

I realize those of you professional players like to bite down on these beginner books to show off your skills, or whatever it is that you do. But the key to writing a review is to rate something for what it is, not what you wish to make out of it. If you want a professional Dylan harmonica book, they're out there. This book is meant for begginers and I give it five stars as a begginer book. Your showing off is not going to help customers with their product choices.

I borrowed the book from a friend thinking I was going to go home and learn some great dylan solos. the truth is it was a little dissappointing. the great thing about dylan and the harp is the rhythm he uses. I think you could pick apart the chords that he plays without the book. But we also cannot expect too much from tab books. the only way to learn some good solos is by the good old fashioned ear, and it really makes you a better harmonica player. The book is very simplistic, if you are a beginner than maybe look into it, but I have faith that you could jsut as easily go step by step and pick apart the melodies of bob dylan.