101 Razor-Sharp Blues Guitar Fill-In Licks (Book and CD) (Red Dog Music Books Razor-Sharp Blues Guitar Series) Spiral-bound – May 10, 2007

Did I just have bad luck? I returned my first book because the cd was almost unplayable. Well it turns out the secound cd was just as bad. The book itself is a bit hoky,but very useable. So Im going to keep the book and work through the licks which are the type of Chicago fills that I want to learn. This is a nice place to start after you get your rhythm playing down.

When I bought this book, I was looking for some new licks. It is a spiral bound booklet with a CD and contains 9 old time simple bluesy type songs. At first when I looked at the book I thought I was being ripped off with another simple simplifed book, but when I worked through some of the licks, I was pleasantly surprised. On the CD, each song is gone through completely and then in sections. Someone sings the words(could be better vocals, but I didn't buy this for the vocals) with accompaniment at a nice pace. In between vocals, the fill in licks are situated. I thought the licks are really good - simple and short, mainly over a lot of dominant 7th chords,and some taken from the Harmonic minor scale which you don't find too often. You can turn down the licks part on the CD if you want to play along with the song. If you are looking for some new licks, this is one book I would recommend.

I didn't get my moneys worth.There was not one idea that I felt worth learning.If your looking for some real tasty minor blues fills like B.B.King would play, don't waste your time with this one.

These are excellent people with fine products. Packages are all worth much more than asking price. Becky went way over board to be sure I was happy with purchases.

I've tried a few books by McCabe before with better than average success. This seems to be a self published book by him. I like the spiral binding. For some reason the song titles are bilingual. The lyrics are not though.Some of the licks are good, some are weak, but most are "ok". Just runs along the blues scale really. The problem with that is if you're going to copy uninspired licks then you'll sound average or worse too. So based on that fact I would advise against buying this publication since it can be bad for your playing. The only plus is that it gives someone ideas of where to place the licks if they were kind of lost doing that.An easy judge of one of these publications is if you can pop the CD in your car or home stereo and just listen to tracks. Does the CD make you excited that you'll soon be playing this? This CD failed that test. For this review I felt I really needed to listen to all of the tracks in case I missed something. Nope, they're all bad. The band is tired and the singer is dreadful. I live in Chicago and there are wonderful blues singers everywhere. You can't even cut the vocals out of the mix. I guess he could be someone's cup of tea but he wasn't mine. The band being reserved is inexcusable for the billing of "Electric Urban / Chicago Style".I'm disappointed in the book and cannot recommend it. Several of the 5 star reviews on here only give reviews to this product so they are suspect as well.

(101 Razor-Sharp Blues Guitar Fill-In Licks)Leading Book of Its TypeThis is undoubtedly the leading book of its type on the market today. 101 authentic urban blues guitar fill-ins in the Chicago blues style, each accurately transcribed in notation and tablature. Each lick is recorded note-for-note on the companion CD and accompanied by a professional blues band (complete with singer Charles Atkins), and wonderfully engineered by Fred Chester, a well-known engineer in the Southeast who has recorded albums for jazz piano great Marcus Roberts and persons of similar caliber.As a professional music teacher of many years, I have found Larry McCabe's music instruction books to be of consistently high quality, popular with students, focused and effective in accomplishing the particular objective.Small wonder. Larry has one of the most reputable names in the music publishing industry. His resume lists over eighty published books for Mel Bay, Centerstream, and other big names in the industry. Two of his books were written for none other than Roy Clark. And he was the guitar writer for Living Blues Magazine for three years, and a member of the W.C. Nominating Committee for many years. This is a teacher who knows how to play and teach the blues.

I have been playing and teaching guitar for many years and enjoy a lot of different blues styles, including postwar urban blues.This book teaches authentic blues fill-in licks to entire songs. this is a great way to begin learning how to play fill-in licks. And in addition it's a great way to learn to play and "feel" blues phrases.The examples are played at a reasonable learning speed and the guitar licks are isolated for the benefit of the learner. Each lick is played to a real song played by a real band, complete with singer.The style is urban blues - what Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Muddy Waters, etc. play.I recommend using this book after you understand and can play blues rhythm progressions.Use this with Larry McCabe's other Razor-Sharp Blues books and you will have a solid grasp of the building blocks that blues guitar playing is made of.