I’ve been following Bill Farrish’s work since first reviewing his Long Arpeggio Studies back in January 2023. Since then, I’ve been a part of his membership website which was around for about a year), and also reviewed two other books: Fretboard Essentials Book 1 and Fretboard Essentials Book 3: Comping Studies (Applied Voicings).
It’s been awhile since Bill released any new educational books so I was excited when Bill told me this new book was on the way.
Harmonic Landscapes is slated to be a part of a series of books that focus on learning the guitar by understanding music, specifically jazz harmony.
According to Bill Farrish in the introduction of the book:
The material presented in this book equips guitarists with the practical application of jazz harmony to the fretboard. Over the course of more than three decades, I have utilized these studies with my college and private students, providing a foundational understanding of applied harmony for the first year of musical study. The studies presented should be applied to all keys, establishing a solid foundation for musical growth.
In other words (my words): the book is what you would get if you wanted to learn jazz harmony, but understand how it works on the guitar!
The thing about this book is that this is really a workbook… and what that means is that this book is best studied with your guitar in hand, simply playing each example in sequence through the entire book. Of course, you should repeat any exercise as much as possible, and once you can play it, I recommend you to commit the exercises to memory so that you can play them anytime even without the book.
The sections where Bill explains secondary dominants and uses one-octave arpeggios showed me how I should have studied these chord progressions when I first encountered them in different Joe Pass instructional videos back in the day.
The main difference to me is that in Joe’s videos he doesn’t teach one-octave arpeggios but relates chord shapes to lines. With Bill’s book he actually fills in the gap by providing the melodic exercises to develop clear ways to melodically outline these chord progressions.
The material in this book reminds of the kind of thing Joe Pass covers in his video, but the way Bill explains is more step by step, which makes me wish this book was around back in 1998 when I started studying this stuff.
Back then, when I studied jazz harmony (via the Berklee Harmony textbooks by people like Barrie Nettles and Steve Rochinski), I had to apply the concepts on guitar, after learning it on piano – which is the main format that the musical examples for those textbooks were written for.
The thing about jazz harmony is that it’s the same for any instrument, but with the guitar – we have limitations due to the number of strings, the difficulty to play certain kinds of voicings, and the range… but after you consider all that, there is so much of the kind of harmonic movements that are able to be played, even solo on the guitar.
Bill Farrish here is showing us the way by keeping it to the core, most important stuff.
The book is a real workout so I would also recommend taking breaks to apply these concepts to other common jazz standards as a break from working through the book non-stop.
Towards the later part of the book, Bill shows how these concepts are applied to different song examples. Closing the book, he also gives his personal fingerings for essential scales – major, melodic minor, harmonic minor and natural minor. The last part of the book has his approach to learning every single note on the fretboard.
In conclusion, this book is one of the books that I wish I had when I started playing guitar. I sincerely believe that this book could have cut some much time learning this things on my own.
Is this for everyone?
Personally I think this book is useful for anyone who wants to get started with jazz guitar and be able to have a systematic approach to learning (in my words) applied jazz harmony.
As I said at the beginning of the review, this is a book that you would study with your guitar in hand.
And… unlike most books that gives you too much to work on, I believe this is a book that you can complete and by completing it, you would have learned something new if you’ve never studied this kind of material before.
Pros: Good material, well organized in a step by step way.
Cons: Not sure whether this is a real con, but I’ll put it here so you know my thoughts on this: Although suitable for self-study, for some, this book might be best studied with a good jazz guitar teacher to help guide you to supplemental materials, recordings and songs to learn, in addition to the book’s materials.
TLDR: If you’re a guitarist who wants to understand the basics of jazz harmony, this is a good book to give you practical hands-on work on the guitar. It’s a jazz workbook for guitar!
Get the book here on Amazon: https://a.co/d/hCcL5Hx
I received an advanced copy of the book from Bill Farrish. Thank you Bill!
[Submissions for Review Consideration]
- Are you an author who wrote a jazz, guitar or music book?
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Please send me a message at azsamad3 at gmail.com with:
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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?
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