Customer Reviews

Santana / Supernatural (Authentic Guitar-Tab)

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

 

 

Santana and his great music are back. All I can say is that this book is excelent. If you want to play Santana's songs like they really are played, I recommend this item. The transcriptions are accurate and reliable. This is a "must have" item for Santana's fans.

I started to listen to Santana's music when I first listened to Smooth. The feeling and energy that Carlos Santana gives can not be found from the others. This book is really great. The tabs are accurate. You are not just playing Santana's song with this book, but also practicing your guitar skills. You can play the sounds what you listen from the CD. This book is not just a must-have for Santana's fans but also for all guitar lovers.

The thing I've always liked the most about Carlos Santana is his unique phrasing and at the end of the day I believe most guitarists are much more impressed with that quality in a guitarist than in any kind of acrobatic show-monkey type qualities like blinding speed, massive use of sound-altering effects/gizmos etc. I'm not going to name these "guitarists" but I think guitarists reading this review will know who and what I'm talking about. Another thing that impresses me in a guitarist is originality and a willingness to experiment - to try to take the music/genre somewhere new and to break new ground. For this reason, although I did enjoy the album a great deal I thought Carlos relied a lot on cliches borrowed from various prior guitar greats such as Jeff Beck and Les Paul before him but I thought he didn't do enough original with the techniques to make me go "wow!" like say Joe Satriani did with "Surfing With the Alien" for example or like Slash on "Appetite For Destruction" or even with his own previous work "Abraxas" which inspired me a lot more than this album and is still for me Santana's best album.

There is nothing wrong with using repeated notes, tremolo picking, double-stop and unison bends but if it is used so much throughout each track here with little unexpected variation it just becomes boring and predictable and is not what classic guitar albums are supposed to be. Still, that said, this is still a strong album because of the other aspects such as the vocal performances and the great songwriting especially by the guests on the album. It's hard to go wrong lyrically and compositionally when you have the likes of Laryn Hill, Rob Thomas, Wyclef Jean and Dave Matthews writing and performing for your album and so although this is an overall good album for me it is just an okay Carlos Santana outing and certainly does not surpass his great phrasing and interesting work on "Abraxas". What he did on "Samba Pa Ti" for example still gives me goose bumps when I listen to it.

This transcription book though ranks among the better ones that I've seen for accuracy as well as presentation as the font is large enough to make it easy to read along and play and the binding is thoughtfully done so that it stays on the page you want instead of folding into itself and doesn't come apart at the spine when you press down to achieve this although naturally it is not the optimal binding that musicians prefer which would be a ring-binding as pianists and guitarist both need both hands on the instrument and cannot afford to have to keep sticking a hand out to ensure the pages stay where they should. The only beef I have with this book is that the transcription of the final "second part" of the last track ("Freedom?") isn't here. Otherwise for those who wish to play as closely to the cd as possible, this book is the one to get.

Not perfect but good enough.