Customer Reviews

Classic Rock Guitar: Jam With Songbook (The Ultimate Beginner Series)

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I've bought lots of beginner books for learning rock and blues guitar technique, but this book is great for learning to play real songs quickly without having to understand a lot of theory or being a master of scales. The standards covered in the book and CD are simplified versions - slowed down - of Hotel California, Europa (Santana), Tush, Riders on the Storm and Proud Mary. Once you pick through the tab a few times, you can start playing along with the CD fairly quickly. I'd still recommend that you invest in a utility that let's you slow down the tracks even more to be able to hear the different notes, like Transcribe!

I was very disappointed with this product. The CD contains some musicians playing and singing each of the songs included. Pay a little more and get the Hal Leonard Publications' Guitar Play-Along series or Wise Publications' "play guitar with ..." series or Total Accuracy's "Jam with ..." series. Those series include CDs which have 2 recordings of each track. The first recording has no vocal and the second has no vocal and no guitar. In my humble opinion, having to supply the guitar yourself will improve your playing more rapidly. This product however gives you a recording that includes not only the bass, drums and keyboards but also includes the guitar and vocals. So you can't really see how YOU sound without their support. The one place you get a chance to play without having the studio guitarist playing is on Europa. They give you some space to solo near the end but you had better have a good ear or a transcription of Santana's work from some other source because the accompanying book doesn't give you any clue at all about what to play.