Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

An excellent book for bass players	Customer Rating:
This is a great book, it's easy to follow and full of useful tips. It's helpful for beginners (like me) and a friend of mine with 25 years' playing experience found it worth his while too.

You must have this book!

Customer Rating:

I have bought a few other books on the subject but my goodness this one takes the biscuit. If you can only afford one book then this is it! It's packed with very good structured playing tips and excercises, (also included on cd) plus other stuff on buying and looking after your instrument. You'll learn something from this book even if you have been playing bass for a while and you certainly won't be wasting your time or money, buy it!

good, but has flaws

Customer Rating:

I got this book from the library and he does explain some things well. The book is strangely laid out, with too many lame jokes. I agree with the reviewer who says that Mr Pfeiffer jumps "straight into C minor" too soon. He does have useful things to say, and I did learn from it. He spends tiem trying to explain how modes work, and what they actually are, explaining it well in the text, then gives far too many diagrams amongst the text, making it seem so much more complicated than it actually is. He is good at referring in the text to other parts of the books where it is relevant to do so. I disagree that a beginner would struggle with this; just read the text and think hard about what he's saying. The accompanying CD is referenced "by the second" in that each musical example refers to a specific minute and second of the cd. It would perhaps be better if he either didnt include every single example on the CD, or grouped them onto individual tracks, leaving a short gap between each example within the track. I'd rather replay the track with one button-press than fiddle about getting to a particular timespot. Its worth the money, and he's clearly given it a lot of thought; although flawed its amongst the best of a poor bunch.

A Great Disappointment if you know the VERY basic stuff

Customer Rating:

I bought this book as I expected it to be a guide for everythign to do with the bass, as I foudn the tremelo guitar version to be. That wasn't the case at all. This book is much thinner, rather poorly written, and that guy should have his photos banned for scaring small children. I found this book to be bad, but I gave it to my father (an absolute beginner who was struggling a little) and he found it very helpful. So buy it if you're a total beginner at muic who feels a bit lost, but avoid it otherwise

Not for novices, but for dummies with experience.	Customer Rating:
In line with other reviews, it appears that if you already have some knowledge of the subject,these books are great. However, for the novice, it assumes too often that you already have the basics under your belt. I now wouldn't buy any dummies book unless I had a rough idea of the subject that needed fine tuning. Look elsewhere if you're new to the concept