Customer Reviews

Bodhran Tutor-Absolute Beginner's

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

The bodhran is an instrument that really requires a teacher. However, for an absolute beginning this book is a great start. I do not know why a previous reviewer complained that the CD tracks are backwards or that the selections do not repeat enough.

On the contrary, each selection repeats a few times and many are set to music that plays for nearly a minute each. This is one strength of the book since it allows the student to practice exercises with music. On my CD the tracts follow the book precisely. It also provides a number of songs with transcriptions. This is a big plus over other books I have seen. A player needs a various patterns to practice with music to have any hope of progressing.

The one drawback is that it really does not demonstrate how to perform the "triplet" which is an important part of playing.

Finally, this book and CD is available directly from the publisher--www.melbey.com--at a greatly reduced price from what is advertised here: $12.95

I just got the CD edition of this booklet. Aside from being cheesed at how short it is for the price, it has pluses and minuses. On the plus side, the prep material is brief but reasonably thorough, and the addition of drum and whistle tunes to play along with is really good. On the minus side, I almost immediately came to detest the tablature method used to the exclusion of standard notation (I'll have to go back with a notebook and copy them out into standard), and the main problem with the excercises and play-along tunes is that the tempo is unreasonably fast for a beginner to keep up with. Having so much bass in the recording also obscures the strikes, which are too easily lost in a resonant wash and simply become muddy. I guess what I'm trying to say is a good idea didn't get executed very well in my opinion.

As a musician but new to playing the bodhran, I was hoping this would give me a nice introduction to this drum. But I got a book that was lacking a lot of basic information, often made confusing statements (like saying only to use the bottom of the stick...and then following it up with a statement about the top of the stick "coming into play naturally"...hardly something that comes natural to new players!) It has a CD to play along with the music, but goes WAY too fast for any beginner to really be able to comfortably follow along with, with sound that was below par. It just zips through all the exercises without playing the rhythms slowly at first so you can get the hang of them. Add to that the non-standard tablature that is unnecessary, a fairly high price, and the fact that the entire book is only 30 pages and it's hard to recommend this unless you absolutely can't find anything else to start with.

The beginner,s manual is at first look an "easy to use method", however when you try to use the accompany of the CD, the beginning is at the end. This making it difficult to get started. Also, it would be helpful if there were more repitition with each section, as well as some pause for trial after each segment, as it is a bit difficult to operate CD and drum at the same time.

Worse than useless. I would have given it less than one star if there was such a rating. Amazon really betrayed my trust on this one.

The 'book' in this case is a half comic book size, center stapled, waste of dead tree. The first pages are dedicated to things anyone actually thinking of even buying a bodhran knows; the rest of the 'book' presupposes a knowledge of musical notation or experience. I have neither. Also, it repeatedly refers to the 'CD.' There was no CD. Total rip-off.