R&B Bass - A Guide to the Essential Styles and Techniques Book/Online Audio (Hal Leonard Bass Method)

An Excellent collection of blues songs that are most common for the student of the Blues

I wish more of the Hal Leonard series' were written like this, with useful performance information! This is *the* best bass instruction book I've used. It gives concise performance information (fingering, techniques, reasoning, theory) and the transcriptions are true to the original recordings, not how cover bands perform them as seen in the Blues Bass book. The selection of songs covers material I'd never given the time-of-day, but am now a fan. The recordings on the CD are high-quality and give you something to strive for, the playing is very clean and solid. If Mr. Letsch rewrites the Blues Book, Hal Leonard would have another winner. Buy this book. Buy this book if you don't like R&B, you will after becoming familiar with the groove these players have. Buy this book!

Great for learning new bass licks

The book doesn’t give you time to select the song, get your guitar and play. As soon as you hit the button, the song starts. NO COUNT IN at all!!!

excellent guide

This is an excellent collection of R&B bass transcriptions. The songs are well chosen and the recording is well done. Plenty of material here to keep a person busy for awhile, especially the two Stevie Wonder selections.

Much like the Hal Leonard Blues Bass book, this book selects a number of classic songs and presents them in a very easy to learn manner. The author organizes the songs in order of difficulty. So as you progress through the book the songs also become more challenging. My primary reason for wanting this book was the song selection, but also I prefer the way the author presents the material. Even a fledgling bass player can get up and running quickly with this book and the CD, although I would recommend finding the original tracks and studying them also. They provide just enough theory at the beginning of the book to help you understand how the songs are constructed.By the time I work my way through all of the songs I will be a more confident R&B player.

This book is very good at what it does, and could've been even more useful with little or no additional effort from the creators.The good points : the basslines are well-presented and the instructional information on technique and music theory is good.The backing band is very good, with legendary Tower of Power guitarist Jeff Tamelier credited as a performer.The bad points : this book/cd is NOT a play along but could've been if the bass had been recorded into just one channel rather than both channels. (A) The bass volume in one channel might be barely slightly quieter than the other channel but it's still way too loudly audible.For the most part the entire cd is the same sound coming from both channels as if "mono" rather than the much preferred "stereo : Band on channel 1 and Bass on channel 2". (B) The songs are not performed all the way through as full versions, instead usually less than approximately one minute of music. Each song begins and ends abruptly without any four beat metronome intro or a fade out exit. This cd is not designed as a play along.Although the Amazon website description never claimed the book to bea play along this is the 21st Century and the book is from a major publisher Hal Leonard. It could've and should've been a play along with little or no extra production expense to the creators.I recommend buying this book and also buy an additional book/cd of your desired play along song ( or even better jam along with the original artists' recordings to get the proper "feel" of playing ahead, on, or behind the beat). Music books are an incredible bargain for the price, so do not try to economize or micro-manage by buying just a play along book.The play along books with cd and tablature likely will not provide the technique and music theory commentary provided in this book.

In general I like this book but it has one major problem .When you are using the playalong tracks (which work brilliantly on other Hal Leonard books that I own)...... there is no count in and they start immediately you press the play button on your phone. So by the time that you have your hands back ready to play , you've missed the first bar .If it wasnt for this I would give it 5 stars , but this is an absolute pain .

Ottimo libro per la comprensione delle linee di basso usate nel R&B di base (anni 60-70) Semplice e immediato

Très bon livre pour apprendre et progresser à la guitare basse RnB. Bien qu'écris en anglais, c'est un livre tablatures pour basse facile à comprendre avec beaucoup d'exemples. Très content de mon achat. merci

Un buon metodo per basso che spiega in modo semplice e chiaro gli elementi essenziali per approcciare l'accompagnamento nella musica soul con questo strumento. Non adatto a chi comincia da zero in quanto molti concetti vengono dati per scontati ma può andare bene per chi suona già da un po' di tempo: ogni esercizio viene presentato in modo da essere facilmente comprensibile. È possibile utilizzare il supporto audio direttamente on-line tramite un player web (Playback+) oppure scaricare gli MP3 in un unico file zip. L'unico difetto che ho riscontrato è che negli esempi, il basso è registrato con un volume non adeguato ed è difficile seguire esattamente le note dei vari brani, ma si può ovviare tramite l'equalizzatore di qualsiasi player audio come VLC, Media Player etc.Il prezzo è decisamente accessibile.