Book Review: 

  The Beatles Complete Scores

The Beatles: The Beatles - Complete Scores Performed by The Beatles. For voice(s), guitar(s), bass guitar, drum set and keyboard. Format: complete score songbook. With vocal melody, lyrics, standard guitar notation, guitar tablature, standard bass notation, bass tablature, chord names and drum notation. Classic Rock, Pop Rock and Psychedelic Rock. Popular boxed gift set. Includes complete transcriptions of all instrumental and vocal parts. Series: Hal Leonard Transcribed Scores. 1136 pages. 7.25x10.88 inches. Published by Hal Leonard. (HL.673228) See more info...

For a music lover and/or guitar lover, it just doesn't get any better than this! This is truly a book to treasure for a lifetime, one that offers endless possibilities for musical pleasure, and musical growth. The two best things about this 1,136 page tome are these: it has every song the Beatles ever wrote OR performed, and it has the note for note transcriptions of the arrangement used on the recording. For us guitar players, this is extremely fortunate, since the guitar was at the heart of most of the Beatle classics (and certainly those wonderful acoustic based songs.)

The guitar parts are written in tab as well as notation. One thing I particularly appreciate is that the  rhythms and strum patterns are given for the guitar parts. Of course, the bass lines are here too, as well as the essence of Ringo's drum parts. This book is priceless on many levels: it is not only an endless source of pleasure simply to paly the music, but the fact that the original arrangements have been transcribed makes is an excellent source for the technical study of the craft of songwriting and arranging by some of the greatest songwriters ever.

Everything is here, from "Blackbird" to "Dear Prudence" to "Rocky Raccoon". It truly is a must have for every guitar player. I got a lot of things cleared up for me on many songs I have played for years, finally discovering the details of some of the guitar parts or chord changes that I almost had right, but not quite!

Oh, and last but not least, the songs are indexed in alphabetical order (not date of publication), which makes it easy to find the one you are looking for!

Take a Principled Lesson on Blackbird.............