Dropped D Guitar: Bach to Blues [Paperback]

This book, Dave Marshall's "Dropped D Guitar - From Bach to Blues" is another one of those "do I like it.....or not" books from Mel Bay.

This book has a pretty good selection of songs, tho most of them are in the Bach vein. There are 51 tunes total, ranging from Classical, Traditional, and Rag Time and Blues, to Canadian, English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh tunes. The CD has a decent quality to it, and tho it is not up to the level of some of the other CD's I have got thru these type of books, you can still just put it on listen to it.

This book really shines because of all the Bio information that it gives on the songs and performers. This, and the "mini" music lessons at the front of the book are some of the best parts of the entire book.

But there are some problems. A full 3rd of the book is classical, and that's OK, but the other selections are played like a Classical player would play them, not a true Blues player, etc. Out of those "51 tunes", "Pachelbel Canon" is repeated 4 times, and "Scarborough Fair" 3 times, in different keys. But they are listed as a "different tune". Each Tab is different in typesetting and size, like the Master Anthologies reviewed elsewhere.

The book is BRAND NEW, but came with a errata page with 29 "corrections" for the book! I am talking missing lines, measures re-arranged, and entire songs out of order with the CD. It looks like a Jr. High School class put this thing together. I have wrote to Mel Bay about this (Oct.30 2006) and still have not received an answer on how to get this fixed. If I would have paid their full list of $22.95 I would be more upset than I am.

And to top it all off, the tempos at which these are performed at, and written for, would put an audience asleep in 10 min.....I almost fell asleep just listening to the CD! Only 5 of the tunes could even be called close to a "medium tempo", and that might even be a stretch.

It is hard to find a lot of stuff written for Dropped D tuning, so when I found this one and the Tom Ball one, I jumped on them. But both have been a let down really, even tho the Tom Ball one is light years better than this one.

If you would like to learn some Classical Guitar pieces in Dropped D, and are at an Advanced Beginner - Intermediate level in your playing, I would say go ahead and grab this...AFTER you check to see if it has been corrected. Then find it used.