I reviewed the Bass Tab White Pages last time out – a good relatively inexpensive source of pretty accurate bassline transcriptions.
As well as the White Pages, Hal Leonard also publish a series of 5 ‘bibles’ – each book is genre specific. I’m going to look at The Pop Rock Bass Bible first – but I’ll get round to the other four books in the series soon
One thing I’ve not done yet – that I’ll try and do and update the review – is work out how many of the tunes in the Pop Rock Bass Bible are also in the Bass Tab White Pages – because there’s definitely an overlap
Anyway onto the book itself, there’s 220 odd page and 31 tunes – the tunes are: All I wanna do, Bad love, Bennie & The Jets, Brown Eyed Girl, Can’t Stand Losing You, Cheap Sunglasses, Crazy Little thing called love, Don’t Stop Believing, Dream Police, Fascination Street, Fly Away, Good Times, Heart & Soul, I Did It, It Can Happen, The Joker, Lady in Red, Maneater, No Reply At All, One Thing Leads to Another, Rikki Don’t Lose That Number, Rock in the USA, Smooth Operator, Stuck in the Middle with you, Suffragette City, Thriller, Turn the Page, Veronica, Werewolves of London, When the Heart Rules the Mind and You Oughta Know.
So there’s a good cross section of tunes, most of them are pretty easy and would suit a beginner with some songs already under his belt. A couple of them are tricky though – Alanis Morisette’s You Oughta Know in particular, great bassline by Flea! I played through 3 or 4 of the tunes that I already know and the transcriptions seem pretty accurate
Unlike the Bass Tab White Pages, Hal Leonard’s Bass Bible series are all printed on decent quality paper. But like the White Pages, the book doesn’t come in a spiral bound form – which means it’s utterly useless on a music stand so you’ve either got to break the spine of the book to make it stand on a music stand, or break the spine to photocopy the pages you want to put them on a music stand.
WHEN WILL MUSIC PUBLISHERS LEARN THAT THICK MUSIC BOOKS NEED TO BE SPIRAL BOUND? (Uh, probably never dude. )
Rant over, the Pop Rock Bass Bible is a pretty cheap ($17.95 in the US) way to add another 30 songs to your collection of basslines. There’s 4 or 5 really cool tunes in there, 3 or 4 others that you probably should know if you’re ever gonna be a ‘working’ bassplayer, and about 20 songs that you’ve got to remember you’ve got the bassline to so that if you’re asked to play it one day you don’t spend the best part of half a day working them out when you could have sight read them in real time! (Yep, that happened to me three weeks ago! I need an index system!)
