Customer Reviews

Latin Guitar: The Essential Guide to Brazilian and Afro-Cuban Rhythms

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Now I realize how a small seventy-page book can represent a year's worth of work on the guitar. The reason, of course, is that learning the instrument is all about muscular memory. You just have to do the repetitions (humbly, day after day) until the skill is in your body. Well, I'm thinking that I've found an excellent guidebook for the guitar practice that I'll do in the coming year. I love Antonio Carlos Jobim and afro-cuban music so much. It's the kind of music that I aspire to play more than anything, so I can't tell you how glad I was to find a reasonably basic instructional book that addresses it directly. But make no mistake that this is Not a beginner level book. Although I don't have a lot of skill, I've been messing around with and reading about guitars, music theory, and playing for many years, and I found the level of instruction to be perfect for me.

The excercises come in the form of chord progressions that illustrate all the different rhythms and their variations (bossa nova, samba, partido alto, bolero, cha cha, mambo, nanigo). No songs of any kind, but the examples sound almost like songs (very short songs) and are typical of the type of music that they illustrate. And the CD (which you HAVE to have, with a subject like this) is excellent. You could almost listen to it by itself just for fun, but not quite, since the tracks are only long enough to show you the exercise but not long enough to entertain. This book/CD package is an overall outstanding intro to these rhythms, though it could use just a bit more on all the afro-cubans.

Tons of more advanced chord voicings there so you might want to be playing the guitar for a while. No need of virtuosistic skills, though. It is about internalizing the rhythms and becoming familiar with the typical chords of latin music. After mastering this book, you will be ready to read a bossa nova song-book and play the tunes with decent strumming patterns. It might help your cha-cha jams, too. The Cd really helps, too.
I am glad I purchased this book and I recommend it.

This is a great little book (not that little once you realise how long it will take to get it all down). Like more than a few people, I can play quite a few styles, but Bossa Nova is a new one for me, and it takes a while to get you head round the chord changes. The level is good for a guitarist who is already pretty familiar with everything but certainly doesn't have to be an expert; even the early lessons take a while to get down smoothly due to the peculiarities of right hand technique plus some occasionally tricky chord changes. The demo CD is good as well. Someone else here said there is a year's worth of work in this book, I'd say that's about right. But good fun work;-)

Finally! A rhythm guitar book/CD that does exactly what it's supposed to do, and it's in Latin styles to boot. Unlike a lot of tutorial books, the tracks on the accompanying CD are bare-bones - consisting of just a drum machine and guitar - and the exercises are directly applicable to improving your musical skills within the Latin idiom. I'm a fan of both approaches, as sometimes these books disguise their simplemindedness with elaborately produced backing tracks and meaningless exercises that distract rather than build real chops.

This book contains both traditional notation and TAB for multiple Latin styles. Half the book is Brazilian-based and half is Afro-Cuban/Merengue. This is not a complete compendium of Latin-related styles (there's no Tex-Mex, Merengue, or folk-style stuff here) but what it does cover, it covers in admirable detail.

Buckingham assumes you are at least an intermediate player. You don't have to be an intermediate player to start playing Latin rhythm guitar, however, and if you are a beginner I suggest substituting simpler chords for the more complex harmonies while keeping the rhythm notation intact. This book has definitely helped me add more complex chords to my vocabulary and repetoire and while some might quibble that all these 'jazz chords' aren't necessary I am glad that Buckingham provided me with reasonable challenges that help me to improve my ability on guitar.

Lastly, this is a rhythm guitar book. I can't stress this enough. You will not learn any lead licks. But if you'd like to be able to accompany yourself on arrangements of authentic modern Latin music (such as any Jose Feliciano ballad) you've come to the right place. I believe the skills you learn here can be transferred back into other styles as well.

I strongly recommend this book for any guitarist interested in learning more about playing Latin rhythm guitar.

This book is directed at rhythm playing. The sections setting forth different rhythms and strumming styles for bossa nova and samba are worth the price alone. The treatment of Cuban styles isn't near as helpful and your probably better off going somewhere else for Cuban styles. The most irritating thing about this book and why "Its Good But Could Be Better" is that there is almost no discussion of theory, chord progressions, chord extensions, or keys and scales used. This is particularly important for bossa nova and samba because so many of the examples use jazz and latin jazz chords and progressions, i.e. minor 9th, 11th, 13th, augmented, diminished, 6/9, minor 7th chords, etc. It would have been particularly enlightening for the author to simply tell the reader how the presented jazz harmony and jazz progressions work and why. As someone who plays thinking about theory rather than rote chord progressions and scales, it really helps to understand the theory behind the chords and melodies being used, that way its extremely easy to use the same theory any time I want.

Mr. Bruce Buckingham is a musician and professional educator. As such, his academic approach seams to be very well designed to take you from the beginnings of Bossa Nova, into the more complex rhythms in a logical, progressive manner. My impression is that he is well familiar with the learning process and knows how to nurture it. He uses tablature, which on the one hand tends to tolerate the aweful illiteracy we find in so many guitarists, but on the other hand I guess if you want to sell guitar books, you have to include that majority of guitar players who are unable to read music. I recommend this book to my guitar students as a great latin resource, even though I wish educators would stop catering to illiteracy by using tabs; it's like making ebonics an official language so ghetto kids don't have to learn real English.

Comme le titre l'indique, il s'agit essentiellement d'apprendre les "clichés" rythmiques propres aux musiques latines indiquées.
L'auteur propose une série d'exercices relativement simples harmoniquement de façon à asseoir votre connaissance.
On ne trouvera par conséquent pas d'exercice typiquement "flatteur" comme dans d'autres ouvrages.
Le but est d'assimiler le groove sous de multiples aspects.
La partie afro-cubaine est un complément intéressant par rapport aux autres ouvrages traitant de la musique exclusivement brésilienne.
Un excellent ouvrage. Efficace.

excellent thank you