Essential Styles for the Drummer and Bassist, Book 2 (Book & Cd) [Paperback]

Steve Houghton (Author), Tom Warrington (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1992 | Series: Essential Styles

Essential Styles, Books 1 and 2 are two innovative book and play-along CD (or cassette) packages that teach 50 essential grooves from today's jazz and popular styles. The books include written-out charts of each selection and performance tips for both drums and bass. All of the grooves have been recorded with a rhythm section and woodwinds, with drums mixed on the left channel and bass on the right, so either instrument may be dialed out. In addition, many of the tracks contain open choruses of comping so any instrument can practice playing solos! Essential Styles emphasizes the most important aspects of solid group playing; locking-in between the drummer and bassist, providing a strong rhythmic foundation and creating an authentic feel for whatever the style demands.

Product Details

• Paperback: 44 pages
• Publisher: Alfred Publishing Company (June 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0739012037
• ISBN-13: 978-0739012031
• Product Dimensions: 11.5 x 8.5 x 0.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #333,170 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not for anyone interested in JAZZ bass lines, January 9, 2011

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This review is from: Essential Styles for the Drummer and Bassist, Book 2 (Book & Cd) (Paperback)

From the standpoint of someone wanting to learn something about jazz bass lines, this book is next to useless. Only a few of the tracks are jazz tracks, but those don't have written bass lines. Warrington offers written example bass lines for the other genres of music this book covers (rock, funk, latin, etc.), but not for the jazz tracks. All he offers in writing for the jazz bass tracks are the chord changes.

You say, well, he must have intended that we supply our own written bass lines for the jazz pieces, so he gave us no bass lines of his own intentionally? I think that is obviously NOT the case. Take this line from Vol. 2 regarding the Medium Jazz track:

"Notice that you never find two adjacent chords with the same bass note." And later in that same paragraph:

"Notice here how the bass comes down out of the high register into the walking line."

You can't notice ANY of those things in the book because there ARE NO written bass notes. Zero. Zip.

To be fair to Warrington, he must have been listening to his bass lines in order to describe them in that way. But why those bass notes didn't make it into the finished book is hard to conceive. And why he didn't notice it himself in Vol. 2 when Vol. 1--published two years earlier--made the same gaffs is even more difficult to figure.