Stephane Wrembel - Getting into Gypsy Jazz Guitar

Stephane Wrembel Getting into Gypsy Jazz Guitar PDF. This book focuses on the key elements of the Django Reinhardt Gypsy jazz or jazz Manouche guitar style. The information revealed here was gleaned from years of experience jamming with French Gypsies and studying with masters of the style. A native of France, Stephane Wrembel acquired his skills entirely by ear and has taught scores of musicians worldwide using the method that appears here in text and notation for the first time. Written in English, German and French with all musical examples in standard notation and tablature.
Wrembel conveys his knowledge in a logical step by step manner, exposing the reader to the authentic Manouche style as it continues to evolve in France and Holland. Medium to advanced in difficulty, this method is designed for the guitarist who is already familiar with jazz harmony and note locations on the fretboard.
This is a great and practical introduction to the concepts behind gypsy jazz guitar. Typical chord progressions are shown and the relevant arpeggios over the basic chords. Once you understand the concepts you can quickly start to improvise and build on the base. Examples are shown in tablature.
This is a fine workbook for Gypsy Jazz. To begin with, the CD covers nearly all the musical examples. The sound on the CD is real guitar, well-played, and in a perfect tempo for learning, not too fast, but fast enough to swing. The author uses standard notation, tab, and fretboard diagrams to illustrate his ideas, so there is little danger of the reader getting lost.
There are exercises stressing the importance of pick-hand technique; there are arpeggios, and arpeggio extension; there are extensive exercise for adding upper and lower approach notes to arpeggios. There are also sections covering improvisation, basic shapes, chord-voicings, accompaniment, the harmonic and melodic minor, and more.
It starts with learning the picking technique and then give you the typically used jazz manouche chords, how and when to use them.
The main part of the book teaches you how to solo. This is without a doubt the best part of the book due to the way Stephane explains how to learn soloing using basic shapes.
This soloing part of the method leads you gently through learning simple shapes that are easy to learn, then adds additional tones in subsequent chapters. So you learn first the triad shapes, there are lots of musical exercises to get this down. Then he later add the altered tones, so it's not too much information to learn at a time.
If you're looking for a book of Django solos in tab, or for a book with the chord progressions of the standards, this isn't for you. Look rather at one of Robin Nolan's excellent books for the chords and melodies of the standards.
But If you want to have a glimpse at how the gypsies learn how to play, and learn how to improvise. This is THE book to buy. In any case there is no 'one' book for anything. I'd recommend buying this one for learning to solo and to improvise (from beginners upwards) without needing to learn any theory - just shapes. Then get Robin Nolan's books to learn the standards.

Format: PDF + Audio tracks (Mp3). 112 pages