Customer Reviews

Mel Bay Taylor, Martin: Guitar Method Book/CD Set

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

 

 

I have been playing the guitar more than 20 years. This guitar method book covers intermediate to advanced players. However, it also covers a lot of stuff even beginner should know. I also liked the way the author progressed the level of songs. Because the author added some techniques and chords which have been taught in the previous chapters to the next song step by step, you can easily figure out how pros develop the chord voicing and progressions to make plain songs more interesting. Anyway, I definitely recommend this book to guitar players who are searching for hints and tips to jazz up their songs.

Anyone who is serious about playing guitar will know of Martin Taylor, Britain's best known jazz guitar virtuoso. In this book, Taylor shares large chunks of his ideas about how to approach soloing, with special emphasis on piecing together the various aspects of melody, harmony and rhythm. It is assumed the student has some basic grounding in music theory. This is NOT a book for beginners, although an enthusiastic beginner will find it interesting. Taylor writes in an informal and friendly manner which makes the text highly readable; almost as if he were there in the room with you. For me, studying this book is an important step on my journey toward guitar mastery. If you are seeking some major hints and tips about harmonizing melody with chords and bass lines, if you want advice on left and right hand techniques, if you want to advance your knowledge of the fingerboard and emulate Taylor's expertise I urge you to get to work with this set of lessons right NOW!

This is an excellent book & cd. Don't expect a highly structured lesson format. It is more like having a master guitarist sitting next to you and sharing tips & techniques. Martin Taylor's method is deceptively simple, and yet the music sounds very full and complex. He begins by showing a simple 10ths idea, then adding chords, bass line, melody & special effects, such as harmonics. He ends with a few variations of 'Danny Boy', showing how he phrases the same tune in different ways. The 10ths concept alone is worth the whole book. I played for hours just with such a simple idea. He also gives tips on right & left hand techniques. The tone is relaxed and he keeps reminding you to 'break his rules'. That's jazz! This is for intermediate players who have some basic background of jazz music.

I ask questions about this book, as I have only sample pages to go on. I have not bought this book, however I have questions abou this book. First, I see no standard notation in the examples. Standard notation is the common written language, tried and true for centuries, and found in virtually all classrooms in instututions of higher learning (Mr. Taylor appears to favor a casual verbal, garage gathering approach to communicating musical ideas.) Standard notation is the common written language for communicating between players of a variety of instruments, and has proved to a extremely valuable tool. If you were to ask Charlie Parker if he read music, you know what his answer would be. Does Mr. Taylor's book contain this common language? Additionally, Mr. Taylor says in his intro that chaining licks together is not how jazz is played. If a jazz is a language, like the english language, then looking at the english language, do not people chain together pieces of sentences as modules when they speak? Have not most of the the subparts of our sentences been used before like "licks" ? Do we not mearly tweek these modules by combining them somewhat differently to create sentences? Would this not be the same with tweeking licks? Finally the study of scales is discounted in his into. So, every academic instutution that teaches this very DNA of harmonic content is off base? Are we to believe Mr. Taylor and his distain for an academic aproach? Is his approach mainly to appeal to those who wish that they could learn to play by sitting in a garage and having some say "you just do this...", without any harmonic rhyme or reasona as to why notes are chosen to go with different harmonies? If this is indeed a "you just do this...." approach to playing, rather than an academic approach to the subject, I myself would pass on his methodology. Mr. Taylor is a fine player, by the looks of his introduction, I am not sure that his approach would provide the kind of background that would be comprhensive and could even be couterprductive (afterall the joke by horn players, is "How do you confuse a guitar player, you put a piece of music in front of him." I hope that I am wrong about Mr. Taylor, and his approach, but I have visted his website, and have seen sample video lessons. I didn't see an emphasis on reading standard notation, nor did I see any hint of it in the sample preface pages of Amazon's website. Side note: I had to fill in a star rating for this book, so I just put one star. I would love to be wrong about my suspicions about his approach, and would encourage anyone with further knowlege of Mr. Taylor's methodology to chime in and enlighten me and others. Thank you for taking the time to read my statments.