Customer Reviews

Mel Bay's Master Anthology of Fingerstyle Guitar Solos: Featuring Solos by the World's Finest Fingerstyle Guitarists! Vol. 1

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This book is perfect for people who earn a full or part-time living playing instrumental guitar music. While not all the material here is useable (is any book thoroughly useful?), you will get finished and fingered arrangements by Muriel Anderson, Michael Chapledaine, Duck Baker, Marcel Dadi, Chris Proctor and Don Ross to name a few. Buster B. Jones is in there, so is Stephan Grossman. It's well worth it, because even with the many songs you won't want to practice or play, you wil be getting at the very least a handful of professional level solos that can be put into use. There is an arrangement of "Claire de Lune" that is absoultely stunning. Peter Finger makes a submission that is well worth the practice required, and Don Ross - well, even if you never learn to play like this you can study the arrangement and see how he does it.

That's the nice thing about the collection. In "Buster B. Boogie", for example, you'd have to be a very dedicated player to learn to play it - but even without the high level of technique required, there are miles of major-blues country and swing groove riffs in that one tune alone that can be fished out and used in jams or improvisations.

There are just so very many fingerstyle books aimed squarely at beginners and intermediates, it really is nice to see a more 'mainstream' publication with some upper-level material, and almost all of it fingered.

It's funny to see someone complain that 'alternate tunings should be used' when a little less than half of these are in alternate tunings! If being difficult to play is the sole criterion, then this book isn't very good. However, if new showpieces by modern performers is what you're after, without being scaled down, simplified, or made "E-Z", then this book is well worth it.

Come on already, isn't there enough 'made simple' out there in the world already? Do we really need MORE simplified music? Hey, if this was too hard to play, why would it come with three CD's of the composers playing their compositions fluently? If they can do it, why not make it an aspiration, or a practice goal, rather than a frustrated write off?

It's a regular paper binding, though, which can be a real hassle, since the book is so big. A book like this really needs spiral binding (see Mel Bay Fingerstyle Guitar Gig Book by Bill Piburn). Get ready to photocopy some pages for your music stand.

Recommended, if you're serious.

This is a 3 disk set, with a lot of great music to listen to (which I often do, even after owning it for about 5 years). These are not silly little drills, but production quality from world class artists. Most of their names were new to me, and after being so impressed I have ordered CD's from some of the individual artists: Al Petteway, Pierre BenSusan, to name a few. It is not easy stuff, and it takes a lot of work to master it. Highly worth the effort.

NOT FOR BEGINNERS. This is truly an intermediate-advanced collection. Songs are mostly original compositions and a bio is provided of every artist that has songs included in the collection. Songs are mostly 3 - 5 minutes in length, at the tempo originally recorded. There are various styles of music, and many different techniques are used.

There is no instruction (other than tabs), just the sheet music. If you are not at a solid intermediate level, if you have difficulty reading music, or if you are not interested in a very broad range of techniques, this book is probably not for you (yet).

The CDs (three) appear to not be recorded just for the book, but rather they seem to be a collection of previously released songs from the artists' own CDs. Some have accompanyment, other not. Very helpful. Also very nice to listen to.

If you can play all the songs in this book clearly and at tempo, you are ready to play professionally.
I hope this helps.

This a great book for fingerstyle guitarists looking to expand their repertoire. The cd's that come with the book are a great aid as well

The arrangements are definitely not easy. By using some alternate tunings or making modifications in the arrangements a lot of these songs would be much more playable. I would recommend this anthology for fairly players only.