Customer Reviews

The Carter Family Collection

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

 

 

Fred Sokolow's description of Maybelle Carter's "scratch" style and slide guitar techniques are simply written and easy to follow. The combination of having the lyrics, standard notation and guitar tablature is fantanstic! A beginner can easily get into most of these songs, if you can get beyond re-tuning. But it would probably take a more advanced player to appreciate the nuances of her playing. I also play banjo and have used the standard notation to compose banjo solos. No matter what your level of guitar, if you love the Carter Family songs, you'll love this book!

This guy has an amazing ear. When you listen to the recordings over and over again with the transcriptions in front of you, you can eventually get to where you can net out the autoharp ground and hear the individual notes on Maybelle's guitar. With the exception of simplifying the rhythm of the solos these are all spot on. That's pretty amazing. Tabs and notes are shown for all of the solos.
Even if you don't really want to learn the Carter catalog, the book is still useful for picking up licks here and there. Once you start Carter-picking (with a thump and a single finger pick) you'll use it every now and again. It's a very intuitive style of play once you get it down, and there's no better way to get it down than to learn three or four classic solos.

To add to the rest:

This is from the "recorded version" series so they're true transcriptions of the original recordings (nice to see the Peer International copyright on the bottom from way back when). I hate approximations and other peoples' renditions, and as a beginner they confuse me, so this is just what I was looking for.

The exercises for Maybelle's styles are simple but really helpful and make a lot of sense. You'll figure out soon enough that "old" does not necessarily equal "simple" and most of the modern versions of these songs use a lot of ironing out tricks to clean up what is essentially pretty difficult to play time-wise in the original.

A fine book. Just hoping they come out with added songbooks in the future.

Pros: As a beginner, this book appears inviting to me. Every thing in C major makes it very easy to learn and to play. The accompaniment and the technique are so easy that they bring instant satisfaction. The use of standard notation and tablature is wonderful in learning the sounding notes AND the position on the fretboard. Brief intro on the Carter style gives insight into the art of country music. As to the way Maybelle change the guitar tunning, one has the option of score da tura (change of tunning)or not; it sounds good both ways. I especially like the introduction paragraphs preceding the songs, because they give the details on the Carters and somethng to relate to the song.

Cons: in the songs, with the harmonization written in, it is difficult to distinguish the melody if you don't already know it. Also watch out for the "extra two beats" as 6/4 is often in the Carters' singing. Know that you can often smooth it out by adding extra two beats and make an extra measure out of it.

The Carter Family Collection is all it was advertised to be but was not all that I expected to me. I am used to working out of the key of G for the Banjo and the standard guitar tuning for the guitar. The book favors the key of C, which means that as a beginner, I will need to put the book on the shelf and go back to the drawing board of learning to develop to the interchange of keys.

While the songs here are a great collection, what is not clear until you purchase the book is that the Carter's enjoyed playing the C chord shape, but not in the key of C. Therefore, most of the songs require non-standard tuning of your guitar - usually tuning DOWN frets (like from E to E flat) so even a capo doesn't help. Who wants to constantly be changing the tuning of all the strings just because you'd like to play one song?