Customer Reviews

Hotlicks For Bluegrass Guitar

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Orrin presents the best of the best here. If you were to incorporate a mere 10% of these licks into your own playing, you'll soon be sounding like a contest champ. Orrin presents not just the "flashy" sounding licks, but he also presents phrases that can be modified slightly to use in many songs. I especially like his "desert island" choices. A real winner, from cover to cover!

This is by far the "meatiest" of the numerous guitar instruction books I've come across. Tons of licks and material here, and tons of good discussion about putting together bluegrass solos that's quite helpful. The only real downside is that some of the licks in here really aren't all that hot. In fact, i decided to buy the companion CD from the author, to see if I was somehow playing them wrong, and it turned out i wasn't. He even goes so far on the CD to admit that some of the licks aren't that hot - pretty funny. Anyway, I had a bit of a revelation while going through the book - it made me think, "hey, this is all absurd. I can come up with some better licks than this on my own." Since then, I realize that the licks that don't sound so hot still have their value, and it's worthwhile to get a bunch of different licks under your belt if you want to really fluently play bluegrass solos. The point is, this book got me to finally recognize and act on these crucial insights, which no other book did.

It's an old publication (1985), no CD, just standard notation and tab examples (that keeps it from being 5 stars or useful to many guitarists who just can't learn to read.... But it's very good as far as it goes, has oodles of 'licks' and standard bluegrass phrases, and the narrative is clear and easy to follow when it's time to discuss technique. I've played guitar since 1958, never bluegrass, but I think it could work well for all levels of players who can comfortably work through standard notation and/or tabs with or without a teacher. If not, you're limited to publications that give you recorded examples--I have several tutorials of that kind (bluegrass and other genres, too, I'm a die-hard collector) and have yet to find one that is better than pedestrian or is very useful to people who are much beyond beginners. This is a good, massive tome for those who can wade through it.

I was lucky enough to attend a gig by Mr Starr in Cambridge, UK. I had never heard solo bluegrass guitar before and was impressed, not just by his skilful playing but the effect of that style played solo. It was a very pure sound, quite moving.

I got the book on that basis. It is very much bluegrass, though - solo riffs and variations on the 'g run' - in which case, if you like bluegrass and want to work on flatpicking, this is definitely for you. Mr Starr said at the gig that someone complimented him on the book and said it had made them into a fine mandolin player. Apparently, they had taken one look at the guitar material here and decided that maybe mandolin would be easier...

For my part, I have gone over to classical guitar now but that gig years ago remains memorable.

I will be working for a long time to achieve all that is in this book! Great runs and licks! A CD (or two) to cover some of the runs would be awesome but again this book is LOADED.

I came across this book and realized that it is the most sophisticated approach to understanding the underlying principles of bluegrass guitar. Hopefully the reader is listening to lots of bluegrass to begin with to adopt the sound so that the lack of an accompanying CD can be seen as a minor drawback. Yes, the examples are all in the key of G and C, but what people need to realize is that 1) those are the two most common positions to play bluegrass at the neck and 2) any lick can (and should) be transcribed to the keys of A,E, and D both at the nut and in closed positions as well. I would rather have over three hundred examples of licks in one or two keys so I can just concentrate on building the Bluegrass vocabulary rather than a one thousand page book that did all of the transcribing for me. The scope of the book is not to teach how to read music or about music theory, and it definitely is most useful if you are about an intermediate so you can learn each lick in 1-2 minutes and then just practice repeating it until it becomes burned into your implicit hand memory. You'd be surprised that after about 30-40 licks learned you already start to develop a nice workable vocabulary of bluegrass phrases that can be juxtaposed to your liking.
I am planning on going through this book cover to cover, and combined with Steve Kaufman's method of learning 40 bluegrass songs and learning them in the keys CAGED in open and closed positions this will probably be the best pathway to take to master bluegrass guitar. It takes a while but will be worth it. I digress, but in short this book DOES have very hot licks and ideas and I recommend it to anyone interesting in bluegrass guitar.

I've actually taken a few private lessons with Orrin Star, and found him to be a great teacher, an extremely intelligent man with a naturally dry wit, and a consummate musician with great chops and truly tasty musical ideas. All of that comes through in this book.

Rather than just writing a book of licks, Star offers plenty of great insights here into his overall approach to bluegrass flatpick soloing. He offers ideas on how you can come up with your own parts, how you can modify his licks to fit different tunes, the differences between "lick based" and "melody based" soloing approaches, and the tension and release that makes outside notes sound hot when mixed with chord tones. He also includes one of the best chapters I've ever seen on how to play up the neck, away from open position.

If you really need to hear the licks on CD, Homespun sells a double CD: [...]

Though the book is very well writen it could use a CD with the songs and licks for those of us who may never have heard them before.

The licks aren't so hot. This book doesn't give you any understanding of the scales underlying the licks. Also, it focuses almost exclusively on the open fingering and a limited set of chords which doesn't really help you if you, like, play a different song. So if you think you can memorize your way into bluegrass, this is the book for you.