Customer Reviews

Guitar Pickers Fakebook: The Ultimate Sourcebook for the Traditional Guitar Player, Contains over 250 Jigs, Reels, Rags, Hornpipes & Breakdowns from All the Major Traditional Instrumental Styles

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This excellent (and scarce!) book is good for all playing situations. It is unquestionably the ultimate source for traditional guitar players.

Invaluable for new, practicing, working, and intermediate players. The addition of the discography, indexed by tune title, lets you locate a recorded source for any tune in the whole book. Brilliant!

The author taught for several years at the School of Fretted Instruments in New York City.

Highly recommended!

I've commented on a different guitar tabulature book which was unreadable because it was nearly impossible to tell the 0,3,6,8,9 apart. Not so this book. Instead of the usual tabs notation obscured by six lines its notes are written on a five line format, clearly printed between the lines for the A, D, G and B strings, above the top line for the high E and below the bottom line for the low E. This takes a minute to learn. Some pages are printed a bit on the light side but the notation style means that the tabs are clearly readable.

Looking through the songs it looks like the key is adjusted for guitar playing. Many of my old favorites are written in either D or G. Since my book just arrived in the mail today I'm just getting started playing them but the few that I've done so far sound like the usual fiddle arrangement, except for the key. I suppose you could just capo them if you wanted to play along with a fiddler.

Why 4 instead of 5 stars? The copy I got was a standard paperback binding rather than what looks like a plastic ring binding on the photo. The plastic ring style books lay flatter. (The first music book back I broke was an Arban's methodbook a long time before most people were born so I guess if it bothers me enough I can break this one too. Or I can take it to Kinko's and have them put it in a plastic ring binder.) Only pages 19-153 are songs with the rest of the 191 pages being collateral information, not exactly fluff but not really needed to learn to play the songs.

It is captious to complain about the "arbitrariness" of this or that form of tablature, or indeed of its "difficulty." ALL versions of tablature are arbitrary, and there is no real consensus as to which version is particularly preferable. SO: spend a little time getting familiar with the tablature being used in the present text, and then work your way through a few tunes using its tablature rather than wishing another tab was being used. After doing this, the Brody book becomes a pretty fair offering to the player with at least a little previous experience. It's not great, but taken for what it is, it has some great tunes, in relatively eassy to use arrangements for the early-intermediate player.