Product Description

This "private lesson" with MI instructor Tom Kolb is an easy-to-use guide to the most essential chords, rhythms and strumming patterns for a huge variety of musical styles: rock, blues, jazz, country, folk, RandB, funk, soul, Latin jazz, fusion, ska, reggae and gospel! Each musical example in the book is demonstrated on the accompanying CD, backed by a full rhythm section.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25966 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 56 pages

Customer Reviews

lots of sounds!
Yes, perhaps some of the progressions are slightly generic, but most of them sound really cool and have a full band plus soloist playing along. Of the few guitar lesson books that I have, the CD with this book is the one that has tracks I actually enjoy listening to. You can probably find a version of most of the classic types of style/progressions in this book. Play on!

Great - lots of voicings, takes the dull routine out of practice
I've been doing these progressions in order though you don't have to - but doing so really gives you a feel for how different voicings and sometimes different keys can flavor the same style and make it sound fresh. I had gotten in a rut, droning on in practice trying various voicings for chords and needed something to make such practice more productive and efficient. I tried this book based on the reviews here and found that this guy had done all the work for me in writing out and recording a collection of useful progressions that sound great and really mix up the voicings.

Descriptive narratives are provided in the book for each progression sample. These are really great because they point out the main concepts in a nutshell - things you might already know and understand but might not really talk about in such a well summarized way.

I use the cd that demos each sample to loop the progressions and play along, changing from rhythm to lead back and forth so I am ending up getting more then double my money worth - the rhythm guitar practice is great and then doing lead practice against each progression helps get you comfortable making up rifs and melodies for each style against the various voicings... I can't believe the price point on this. It's so little for so much - get it before they catch on to what a deal this is!

Bottom line: This book is fun, and it helps train your ear and improve your playing. Mastering all the samples will add a lot of variety to your tool kit of sounds - a great collection of voicings to encorporate in your own creative efforts.

a little too cheesy for me
This will help you build your chord vocab but the progressions are pretty cheesy. Tom plays every instrument slapped on each track and the whole thing sounds canned. Many of the progressions sound like they could have been lifted from an elevator music anthology. Disappointed.