BookReview

Along with a brief intro to music theory (every good music book needs a little of this!), Roy's book begins with a cheery little original number called "Boy Scouts Hike" introducing an easy to follow numerical diagram with the proper notation above. As your comfort level increases, the easier diagrams are dropped from certain measures to allow you to site read music. The diagrams are available as the tunes offered become more complex. By picking these tunes apart and reasembling certain measures, I was able to develope some useful chord sequences that may apply to many other tunes.

This book is heavy into finger picking. The description of strokes that even include a page of Roy's famous exhibition stroke techniques, is a bit difficult to decipher. Other books that I have seen have been more thorough in this area such as one of May Breen's books or Wolff's method. This is a great book to supliment what those others do not teach.

*I have recently been informed that much of the original information has been left out of this reprint and it is speculated that some of the original print included more strokes and technique. I cannot confirm this until I inspect an original copy myself.

With the book's finger picking exercises, variety of happy sounding ditties and notation with tableture (a numerical diagram method), I would rate this book an 8 from one to ten. Although one could learn quite a bit from these pages, alot of the more interesting material was hidden in the book and not obvious to someone without some prior working knowlege of music. I am still searching for some more steamy chord solos and this book only offered one hot tune, "Kalamazoo Kapers." A draw back to some would also be that the tunes are not always familiar. It is a good book and if a beginner is not discouraged by some of the arrangements, then they could improve greatly.

Keep Strumming... James