Customer Reviews

Original Jeff Beck

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

 

 

This is one of the best buys, guitar instruction-wise, I have ever made. This is a main reason I improved greatly as a guitarist when I first took up the instrument more than 20 years ago. The version I bought also came with a cassette which had the great Wolf Marshall, guitar transcriber extraodinaire, playing all the examples and more importantly, describing the musical theory involved so that you were not simply copying the licks blindly but you actually knew what you were doing. This is important because it means you get to internalise and reuse what you have learnt for your own improvisation. In short, you learn how to fish instead of getting a fish thrown at you. Mike Michaels also writes the book in a storybook fashion which is refreshingly different as he describes the historical background behind the tracks and even quotes from interviews done with Jeff Beck himself.

Now for the downside: the binding isn't first class and so the pages come apart pretty easily. Also, the transcriptions in the book not only don't follow Wolf Marshall's playing on the tape closely, they are also in many cases downright incorrect. I had to make corrections to the tab just to make sure that they jibed with the cassette which is great by the way as Wolf Marshall plays very closely to what Jeff Beck does on the original recordings. What's disappointing is that one of Jeff's most famous solos - the one from Come Dancing - is incorrectly transcribed and so I had to painstakingly make the corrections first before I could get into learning it.

Perhaps what they should do is to improve the book binding, replace the cassette with a cd and get Wolf Marshall to do the transcribing as well seeing as how he is doing the playing on the cassette anyway. The other text by Mike Michaels can stay as it's pretty good.

Overall, I'm indebted to this book for all the great learnings and spin-off learnings in terms of inspiring me to play blues/rock guitar and to actually get the recordings featured and hence to discover a great guitarist and to make me a lifelong fan. Let's hope they re-release this with the changes I recommended and then it would be the perfect study of Jeff Beck's early style.