Essential Styles for the Drummer and Bassist, Book 1 (Book and CD) [Paperback]

Houghton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1990

Essential Styles, Books 1 and 2 are two innovative book and play-along CD 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: 64 pages
• Publisher: Alfred Pub Co; Bk&CD edition (August 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0739013548
• ISBN-13: 978-0739013540
• Product Dimensions: 11.8 x 8.9 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #290,722 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An incomplete book, April 6, 2009

By 

L. Deleon "Jazz Guitarist" (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Essential Styles for the Drummer and Bassist, Book 1 (Book and CD) (Paperback)

This book could have easily won a 4 or 5 star rating from me, but there is one serious deficiency in this book --- huge portions of what is actually being played is not transcribed. This may be more of a problem for the bassists who are interested in this book, since the drum parts generally are static most of the time. For the first half of the book the bass transcriptions range from very good (and complete) to partial transcriptions ranging from just a couple bars to several bars transcribed while several bars are just left blank, for you to figure out by ear. For nearly the entire second half of the book, the bass player / transcriber (could be a different person I suppose) just decides to entirely stop transcribing the bass part. That's right, for about half the tunes in this book they do not even bother transcribing the bass part. By today's standards, where any guitar / bass book you purchase will have full transcriptions as well as TAB and recordings.....this just doesn't cut it. Yes, even just listening to the tracks could be educational, but.....if I wanted to just learn by listening, I would actually just go buy some CDs of my favorite artists, and do just that....The entire point of purchasing an instructional book is defeated by this lack of complete transcriptions in this book.

The book is more orientated towards blues / funk / jazz styles, which is fine, but there are also many other styles that would make this book more complete and useful as a reference. All of the tracks on the CD are of top quality and true to the styles they represent and are the main reason for the 3 stars in my rating.

Another deficiency is the total lack of explanation of what the bass player is thinking or doing when creating the bass lines. What scales are being used, or theoretical tools, etc...Yes for some, just hearing an example and learning it by ear is enough, but for others like myself I do like to know in more depth what is going on with the scales and harmony.

If you just want to sample and hear different styles, with minimal instructions on how to reproduce it yourself, then you can't go wrong with this book as all the examples are excellent and the playing and recordings are of top quality. If you like to have a bassline fully transcribed, and some explanation as to why the bassist chose the notes or rhythms he did, then this book will fall short. The small amount that is transcribed is in standard notation only, so for those of you who don't read standard notation that would be another reason not to buy it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars If you're interested in Jazz bass--forget this book., January 9, 2011

By 

Coffee Drinker (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Essential Styles for the Drummer and Bassist, Book 1 (Book and 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 CD 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 and CD cover (rock, funk, latin, etc.), but not for the jazz tracks. All he offers in writing for the jazz bass tracks are the chord changes. Amazingly, Vol. 2 of this work--published two years later--is the same way.

You say, well, he must have intended that we supply our own bass lines for the jazz pieces, so he gave us no bass lines 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 charts because there ARE NO written bass notes. Zero. Zip.

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