Classic Queen Guitar Recorded Version Gtr Tab Book Paperback – 1 Jan. 2011

Exallent

Brilliant. Even for pianists / keyboardists this type of book is better in ways than piano-vocal-guitar books usually are because the music in this type of book tends to be more detailed, written more like how the songs actually sound, and it doesn't just make the instrumental line emulate the vocal notes like piano-vocal-guitar books tend to do. And of course it's good for if keyboardists ever wish to pick up a guitar.

I've been searching around trying to find a good book of Queen guitar transcriptions, and this had some of the songs I wanted, so I went with it. The tracks included are: A Kind of Magic, Bohemian Rhapsody (of course!), Under Pressure, Hammer to Fall, Stone Cold Crazy, One Year of Love, Radio Ga Ga, I'm Going Slightly Mad, I Want it All, Tie Your Mother Down, The Miracle, These Are the Days of Our Lives, One Vision, Keep Yourself Alive, Headlong, Who Wants to Live Forever, The Show Must Go On.The TAB is very accurate and detailed, which is good. And there are often piano & synth parts transcribed for guitar, particularly when there isn't a guitar part playing -- the "Bohemian Rhapsody" transcription is magnificent, full of (probably unplayable, but nice to have it anyway) piano-for-guitar TAB. I do have a few quibbles, though. One is that (as often happens in TAB books), the transcribers have chosen the single version of "Hammer to Fall" (which annoyed me, because it was one of the main songs I wanted to learn), which cuts out quite a bit of good guitar stuff from the full album version of the song. Yet they've included the album version of "One Vision" -- why one and not the other?But the real disappointment of this book is that some of the song choices are totally bizarre. I love all of Queen's music, but when I buy a guitar TAB book I really expect the more guitar-oriented songs, and Queen certainly have a lot of them. "One Year of Love" is not one -- it has NO GUITAR in it! So we get synth transcribed for guitar, and then the sax solo transcribed for guitar. Why? Was it bought as part of a job lot??? And there are a fair few of the songs included here basically because there's a good solo, but no real guitar involvement in the rest of the song, which seems a waste of pages in a guitar book. There are other books of Brian May solos, why not include some better full-guitar songs here? I can think of plenty.Oh well, I'm just glad I have "Hammer to Fall", "One Vision", "Keep Yourself Alive", "Stone Cold Crazy" and "Tie Your Mother Down" -- worth the price of this book on their own. Just a pity so many of the other song choices are so off the mark.

Fantastic and very well received present for my nephew