Customer Reviews

Ed Gerhard: The Guitar Songbook (Book & CD) (Acoustic Masterclass)

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I learned Gerhard's version of "The Water is Wide" from an old Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine article, and was thrilled to discover this book. But here's what I found out when it arrived: (a) The CD that accompanies the book has almost no music on it. It is mostly a tutorial to help you with certain snarky technical issues in the individual pieces. Nothing wrong with that, but not helpful if you haven't heard the pieces and would like to know what you're working on in advance. (b) A couple of the pieces are written for use with a slide. (c) Most of the pieces require an unusual tuning. Dropped D tuning is not a big deal, but most of the others are more complicated than that. I wanted this music for performance purposes, and having to stop and tune extensively between pieces makes their use extremely inconvenient, unless you have two equivalent guitars and somebody to tune for you in between. If you know all this and still want the book, it's easy to read and contains both tablature and music notation. Gerhard's work is terrific. But if I had it to do over, I would have passed, based on the above limitations.

Gerhard plays in many different tunes, if you think about it usually it's just a few strings you have to change. Any experienced guitarist that has heard many Gerhard tunes would know he's not in standard sometimes. I found the tabs to be quite accurate, which saved me lots of time trying to figure out what he was doing just by listening, even with it slowed down. I didn't care if it even came with a cd, but it is a nice extra. And please...before you post you playing one of his songs on Youtube, get an unbiased opinion of your playing by someone not afraid to hurt your feelings. Gerhard's music has a touch few can match and I just hate seeing his songs trashed.