Rating:  Summary: Uneccessary Review: I reccomend getting this book only if you want it to have...not to play from. The Beatles are great but it's impossible to get a feel for their music by playing from this book. They often played with several guitars and overdubbed alot, particularly in their later work. Therefore, trying to play many of their songs from this book is incomplete unless you have a whole band to play with. The INCREDIBLY small print is a pain to read as well. I would reccomend getting The Beatles Complete Chord Book instead. It's not in tab form, but if you are good enough to play most of their stuff, you can probably figure out the picking/soloing yourself. If you are still not satisfied, there are alot of good free websites with guitar tabs that have most of their songs, including good versions of Dear Prudence, Blackbird, Julia etc. The version of Blackbird wasn't even that good in this book. So, in conclusion, this is really only for the collector.
Rating:  Summary: The Beatles Review: First off the Beatles have been the most influincing band that i have ever come across. The music is fab. John has a great voice, george plays guitar so well and paul and ringo ice the cake. I have been playing guitar for some time now and have always been interested in recreating that wonder tone the beatles gave 40 years ago. This book is the closet i have seen so far to being accurate. Although there are some mistakes you can figure them out by watching the Beatles Anthology and seeing them actually play the music or even listen and fix it. Great book, love the Beatles, Dont pass this one up. HAL LEONARD CORPORATION YOU GUYS SHOULD FIX UP THIS BOOK AND RE-PUBLISH IT TO MAKE IT MORE ACCURATE ALSO ADD "FREE AS A BIRD" AND "REAL LOVE"
Rating:  Summary: Cancer didn't kill George Harrison, this book did. Review: You pick it up and think, wow!, this is great. Then you read a couple of pages and realize you can get better stuff for free off the internet. Here is what you can expect: 1. Pages are way too small. You'll be flipping endlessly just doing one song. 2. Font is way too small. Invest in a high-powered magnifying glass if you plan on reading it. Don't even think about reading it in dim light. 3. Font is some goofy script and often illegible. Couldn't they just use arial? 4. Mistakes abound.About the only good thing I can say is that they usually get you close enough that you can figure it out. But at this price, it should be accurate. Hal Leonard, shame on you.
Rating:  Summary: Mine was incomplete Review: I don't know if this happened to anyone else, but my book starts on page 33, and six songs were cut off from the beginning! These songs include Across the Universe, which is on of my favorite Beatles songs.
Rating:  Summary: Hal Leonard Strikes again Review: The book is really neat to have, but as a guitarist of 10 years, I just found too many mistakes to even take the book seriously. I just find it ridiculous that this can be published in this state. Regular folk and musicians alike have been admiring, worshipping, and studying all aspects of The Beatles for many years, yet a 20-year old casual musician like myself opens the book and finds laughable mistakes in just minutes. Good material to have, but purchase with caution, especially because of the hefty price tag.
Rating:  Summary: Wonderful! A gift to Beatles fans/musicians Review: I bought this a while back and have yet to find a single mistake in it. Within hours, I had solved some serious puzzles that have plagued my guitar playing for years. The chords I have been using for years were ALMOST right but never sounded correct. Now I have it all. The tablature guitar parts are perfect. I am not a pianist so I can't comment on the piano parts but the guitar parts sound perfect to me. After buying several versions of Beatles music for years and never having good transcriptions, I finally have what I want. Don't listen to the reviewers who nitpick. These are very accurate.
Rating:  Summary: Well, I'm disappointed Review: I've spent only a few minutes with this book (evaluating its suitability and accuracy for a student taking on an analysis in one of my theory courses). I've looked at only four songs and I've found some pretty disturbing inaccuracies, everything from slightly off transcriptions to completely fictionalized guitar parts and even some ridiculous typos in the lyrics. The biggest problem would seem to be the copyist's insistence on the use of repeat signs. In all four cases, this introduced a good number completely avoidable inaccuracies in the scoring (because, as we all know, nobody in pop plays their part exactly the same way the second or third time through the changes). Yes, the book would double or triple in length if the recordings were totally "through-scored," but in nearly all cases this is the only way to obtain faithful and/or sensible-looking transcriptions. I note that something called the "NEW Beatles Complete Scores" is posted on Amazon as a future product-- let's hope that when they get around to it, they'll do a cleaner job. We're fifty years in-- someone needs to set standards for rock transcriptions, so that rock works can finally be acceptably studied in serious music programs. I can think of no better vehicle for this "revolution" than the Beatles, but Hal Leonard really dropped the ball on their first attempt.
Rating:  Summary: Great Resource Review: As has been written on-line at Amazon this book has a number of errors. However I think this is likely the closest we are ever going to come to getting a look at George Martin's arrangements of the Beatles' songs. Furthermore given that George and John are no longer with us and Sir George Martin is aging, I doubt that we're going to see anything better or more accurate, at least in my lifetime. My first purchase of sheet music almost 30 years ago was a book called "Beatles Complete." This publication covered the Northern Songs catalog and not much else. Additionally it wasn't annotated correctly and most of the songs weren't in the key that the Beatles had written them in but I perservered and made notes in the margins. I'll do the same with this book.
Rating:  Summary: Damn! Review: Should be some chinese fellow to do this awesome work. This is the ultimate note-by-note guide to the music of the Fab4. It's almost perfectly written. It's a must-have item for Beatles' Fans that can read sheet music.
Rating:  Summary: The Best We are Ever Likely to Get Review: Let me begin by saying that this book has a large number of deficiencies and errors, many of which have been noted in the Amazon.com reviews. Despite this, I have given it five stars because I do not expect anything better to be produced in my lifetime. There is a huge quantity of accurate information here in a very accessible form at a very small price. You can get a very good idea of what the book is like by reading the reviews here on Amazon.com. Basically, most of the songs that the Beatles recorded through Help are transcribed quite accurately. As the songs became more complex (say Rubber Soul on) some of the transcriptions can be more fairly characterized as "sketches." However, the sketches are some of the best on the market. Someone wanting more completeness would do well to price school band music where the charts for a single jazz standard run about half the price of this book. If you have any knowledge of the music publishing industry, you should have a good idea of what it would cost Hal Leonard to make significant improvements or someone else to produce a competing text. Might as well buy this and make corrections in the margins.
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