I recently revisited Wolf Marshall’s book Giant Steps for Guitar: A Six-Stringer’s Guide to Mastering Coltrane’s Epic. It’s definitely is one of those books that I would recommend anyone interested to develop practical facility to play over chord changes.
At 72 pages, the book is divided into 8 chapters:
- A Brief History
- The Music
- Chords
- A Guitar Approach to the Music
- Basic “Trane-ing” for Guitar
- Rhythmic Approaches for Improvisation
- ii-V-I Progressions and Patterns
- Model Solos
The first three chapters are an introductory examination of the piece, the historical context in which it was created and how we can look at the harmony of the song.
It starts getting exciting when we go into the fourth chapter as Wolf Marshall examines a guitaristic approach to the music. Concepts like common tones, leading tones and neighbour tones are explained with good examples. Then, he goes into positional patterns, linear patterns and close pattern motions. This section alone is worth it’s weight in gold as it really demonstrates how to outline changes smoothly on guitar.
In the next chapter, Basic “Trane-ing” for Guitar, Wolf Marshall gives 49 basic melodic patterns to navigate over the first four measures of Giant Steps. To be honest, this chapter alone could have been another book on its own as it has so many great examples. As I played through the examples, certain reoccurring motives began to emerge and the variations became more obvious.
The last 3 chapters continue the exploration through a study of rhythmic devices (to get out from playing non-stop 8th note lines), ii-V-I vocabulary (to navigate the rest of the tune) and model solos (to connect everything together).
All in all, this is a great book that uses Giant Steps as the main piece but actually gives many tools and lessons that are transferable to other jazz compositions that are similar in nature (fast tunes, with a lot of rapid chord changes).
Even after years of owning and studying the material from the book, I keep getting new ideas and see different things from the book each time. It’s a book that I know I will keep coming back to and sets a high benchmark for how books like this should (and could be).
High quality stuff. Strongly recommended.
Pros: Well designed book. Amazing content and well thought out.
Cons: None.
TLDR: A great book with a LOT of practical exercises and good sounding phrases. Very systematic with tons of examples that you can incorporate into your practice routine. Recommended for intermediate to advanced guitarists, though still worth getting for beginners to jazz (as a mainstay in your library and reference collection).
Get the book from Amazon here.
Check out Wolf Marshall’s website here: http://www.wolfmarshall.com/
[Read more Reviews]
Review #37
Review #36
Book Review: The Motivic Basis for Jazz Guitar Improvisation by Steve Rochinski
Review #35
Review #34
Review #33
Book Review: Sweep Picking Speed Strategies For Guitar by Chris Brooks
Review #32
Book Review: Exercises & Etudes – An advanced method for the fingerstyle guitarist by Itamar Erez
Review #31
Review #30
Review #29
Review #28
Book Review: 21 Insights for 21st Century Creatives by Mark McGuinness
Review #27
Review #26
Review #25
Review #24
Review #23
Book Review: Daniel Donato – The New Master Of The Telecaster: Pathways To Dynamic Solos
Review #22
Course Review: Understanding & Applying the Chromatic Scale by Frank Vignola
Review #21
Book Review: Movable Shapes – Concepts for Reharmonizing ii-V-I’s by Sheryl Bailey
Review #20
Review #19
Review #18
Review #17
Video Review: Essential Percussive Guitar Riffs with Jon Gomm
Review #16
Review #15
Video Review: 8 Sets of Jazz Blues Changes by Randy Johnston
Review #14
Book Review: The Thesaurus of Scale Tone Chords by Alex Rogowski
Review #13
Video Review: Bebop Flow – Connecting Harmonic Concepts with the Family of 4 by Sheryl Bailey
Review #12
Book Review: Improvising Without Scales – The Intervallic Guitar System of Carl Verheyen
Review #11
Review #10
Video Review: Dave Hill – Motif Development (Jazz Guitar Society)
Review #09
Book Review: A Guide to Developing a Chromatic Approach to Improvisation by Tony Greaves
Review #08
Review #07
Review #06
Review #05
Review #04
Review #03
Review #02
Review #01
[Submissions for Review Consideration]
- Are you an author who wrote a jazz, guitar or music book?
- Have you created a DVD or an online video course or subscription based website?
- Would you like me to review your book/course?
Please send me a message at azsamad2 at gmail.com with:
For courses: a link to the course/video/product + access info etc.
For books: a link to the book (Dropbox) or PDF attachment (if it’s small) for review consideration.
Depending on whether I dig the book/course, I’ll let you know if I do plan to review it!
I cannot guarantee a review for every submission & if I’m not too into it, I may opt not to review it. I mean, it’s better to get a good review that for me to write a bad review just because it’s not a match for the kind of stuff I dig right? :p
NOTE: All reviews reflect my honest personal opinion so be aware that I will point out both cool Pros and Cons that I see in the work. You dig? 🙂
Leave a Reply