John Renbourn Fingerstyle Guitar: Folk, Blues & Beyond, Celtic Melodies & Open Tunings, & the Jazz Tinge with CD (Audio) (Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop) |
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John Renbourn
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Pages: 120 (Spiral-bound)
ISBN: 0786650249
Pub: Grossman's Guitar Workshop
Pub date: 2000-05
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 55088
Reader Reviews:
The best value you'll see in a guitar book ever. (0/0 people found this helpful)
For approximately £20, you effectively get three hours of John Renbourn talking and demonstrating all the tunes in this book. Its divided into three sections 1) Folk and blues which includes anji, and renbourns showstopper sweet potato, 2) celtic tunes in open tunings, including a lovely arrangement of South Wind, which he often plays live, and is not as hard as it sounds, 3) jazz tunes - which admittedly are the more challenging of them all. I've seen Renbourn many times, and his usual set list is taken from this book.
If you've seen John Renbourn live, and want to play like him, buy this. You cannot go wrong at this price. I've used it many many times over the years.
Excellent (0/0 people found this helpful)
This book presents an excellent summary of the wide range of Renbourn's guitar styles. The tab and notation is very accurate and well laid out. In response to other reviews above, admittedly the CDs are just the soundtrack to the separate DVD, but I think the main value of these is to hear John playing the pieces as they should be - accompanied by the scores in the book, this should be more than enough to tackle these pieces properly. As for the lack of any track listing - just put the CDs in your PC's CD/DVD drive, launch iTunes, and it will download a full track listing for you which you can then print out.
Audio hard to follow (0/0 people found this helpful)
Although the book is nicely laid out and the spiral binding is extremely practical, I am afraid to say I have been disappointed. I did not realise the audio cds were just an audio file of the video. It's printed inside the book but of course buying online I had no opportunity to see that. Even if I had realised I would have expected the audio to be sufficiently 'self-supporting' to use, but in my opinion they are not, as the audio makes references to positions etc. that are impossible to follow in audio only.
As such I was left rather frustrated. I emailed the above points (politely) to Stefan Grossman, who gave a prompt but rather unfriendly and unhelpful reply.
Definitely not for the beginner to play - but great to listen to (3/3 people found this helpful)
As other reviewers have said, this book/CD set (reissues of previous book/VHS releases) is definitely for the intermediate and advanced skills player. But, as is so often the way with guitar music, a beginner could easily listen to JR's playing and pick up a lot - especially for the Celtic music section.
As for contents - here's an outline:
Folk Blues and Beyond : White House Blues, Judy, Anji, Watch the Stars, Lord Franklin, My Sweet Potato, Abide with Me, and Great Dreams from Heaven
Celtic Melodies & Open Tunings : The South Wind, The Blarney Pilgrim, Bunyan's Hymn, I Saw Three Ships, The English Dance, Lament for Owen Roe O'Neill, Mist Covered Mountains of Home, The Orphan, Lindsey and Sandwood Down to Kyle
The Jazz Tinge : Buffalo, Transfusion, My Dear Boy, Little Niles and Cherry
INFURIATING OMISSION (5/5 people found this helpful)
Take it as read that this book has pages and pages of well notated finger style tunes, and the accompanying three CDs explain in detail how to approach these tunes. But there is one omission that makes navigating this wealth of material a tediously infuriating task - there is no track listing for any of the CDs. Yes, you read that right, there are three CDs with approximately 30 tracks each and no track listing to tell you what tunes you are listening to. You just have to hope that somewhere in the dialogue the performer mentions the name of the tune. Most of the time he is kind enough to do this, but some of the time he doesn't bother. It could have been sooooo simple to make this package perfect but now it's just annoying!
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Books -> Refinements -> Language (feature_browse-bin) -> English
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