Dream Theater Train of Thought [Paperback]

Dream Theater (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2004

This album-matching folio contains complete guitar TAB transcriptions of the songs from the album, including note-for-note transcriptions of all of John Petrucci's virtuoso guitar parts and a beautiful eight-page art section featuring lyrics and the surrealistic art of Jerry Uelsmann. Titles are: As I Am * This Dying Soul * Endless Sacrifice * Honor Thy Father * Vacant * Stream of Consciousness * In the Name of God.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Warner Bros. Publications (June 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0757922368
• ISBN-13: 978-0757922367
• Product Dimensions: 11.8 x 8.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #561,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente, June 14, 2008

By 

Martin Eutimio Cavazos Gonzalez "MaRtYn Proje... (Monterrey, Mexico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dream Theater Train of Thought (Paperback)

Excelente Libro
Excelente Transcripcion
Excelente Album

Se los Recomiendo

MaRtYn
MTY-MEX

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Mistakes left and right..., August 8, 2004

By 

John Grivas (Astoria, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dream Theater Train of Thought (Paperback)

I have been playing guitar for over 15 years and have been into Dream Theater since Images And Words came out. All the tabs in this book (even in all the previous ones) have mistakes. I believe that the tabbers that do these books are Joe Shmoes that don't even listen to Dream Theater and just put something out just to put it out. If you want more acurate tabs for the songs, go to powertab archive and get them for free (tabbed by actual fans of the band)
If I could, I would give a rating of 0 stars.......eh....the artwork is nice...... The one star goes for the packaging.

1.0 out of 5 stars Poorly Done Transcription Book Of Train Of Thought, August 30, 2011

By 

YJM "amazon fan" (Somewhere In The South) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dream Theater Train of Thought (Paperback)

I have written a bunch of other reviews for guitar tab songbooks on Amazon, and believe I have even mentioned that I'm a guitar tab songbook collector. I have an amazing collection of books, many of them out of print now that I could sell for lots of money, but never would. Anyway, part of my collection consists of Dream Theater guitar tab books. Images and Words through Scenes From A Memory were fairly well done tab books (Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence was also as poorly transcribed as Train of Thought). Part of the reason for the accuracy of those books was that Petrucci himself contributed to the editing of the transcriptions, insuring their accuracy. Apparently Petrucci was absent from his editorial duties for this book (and for the Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence book too), because the transcriptions are pretty awful. I wish the same guys who have transcribed the previous three Dream Theater albums would go back and redo Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and Train of Thought, because they have done an amazing job with their transcriptions of those three albums. They would do Six Degrees and Train of Thought proud, but sadly I doubt they will ever be revised/updated, and so we are stuck with the horribly inaccurate tab books of those two albums.

The mistakes in this book are numerous. The most galling is the poor transcriptions of the solo's. The As I Am solo is botched big time, the long ending unison run of This Dying Soul is tabbed with such bizarre finger position references as to make it unplayable. As a matter of fact, all of the solo's in this book are tabbed out with strange finger position references, or are just plain wrong. It's such a shame too, because TOT (Train Of Thought) is one of my favorite Theater albums, and to see it transcribed so poorly is just very disappointing. If you want accurate transcriptions of the album you will have to get them from Japan. There is a Japanese transcription book for TOT that is VERY well done and puts this book to shame, in addition to the Young Guitar magazine transcriptions of some of the songs from the album (which I also own). I urge you to hit up Ebay for those if you really want to play through the songs from the album, accurately that is.

The five star reviews for this book must be from beginning guitar players who have no idea what is accurate and what is not, but then why would a beginning guitar player buy a Dream Theater tab book in the first place? When last I checked, John Petrucci/Dream Theater do not write songs for beginning guitar players. I guess maybe some of the songs themselves might not be too difficult, but the solo's, forget about it. Starting off with Dream Theater solos is a good way to get discouraged, quickly! However any intermediate to advanced player would look at the transcriptions in TOT and know they were poorly done without playing a single note on the guitar themselves.

As I always do in all of my tab book reviews, stress the importance of training your own ear in addition to using tab (or more importantly sheet music rather than just being a tab reader only). I don't care how accurate a transcription seems, I ALWAYS listen back to the solo at half speed as a way of spot checking for accuracy. Many times what I will do is work through the solo's myself and then refer to the book to see where I (or the transcriptionist) may have gone wrong. I urge you to do the same.