The Diminished Scale for Guitar: Private Lessons Series

From a great teacher comes a great resource of lines and uses for this very useful scale. Very useful and easy to understand, GET IT!!!

I recently decided to dig a little deeper into the symmetrical diminished scales (whole-half and half-whole), and have been putting in some time on that. I remembered that I've had this book for a while, and so pulled it out to see if I could get any information out of it. As you might guess from my low rating, once again I could not. The book is short, but not sweet. The author does explain how there are two flavors of diminished (WH and HW), but the explanation is about as short and unsatisfying as can be. There are no diagrams, no suggested fingerings, nothing further. Those things would have been nice-to-have, but not critical. The author then throws in the old "there are really only three diminished scales" thinking that will keep you in a rut. Playing music is about which notes to emphasize, even when scales are made up of the same notes. The modes have the same notes as a major scale. Even though C Major and F Lydian are made up of the same notes, they're NOT the same scale because the notes that are emphasized are different. Putting some context around where the scales are, when to use them and how to use them is what I really got this book for. It would have been a great idea to have diminished chords or arpeggios laid out to set the stage for the diminished scales, but alas these too are missing. There are other scales/modes with a diminished tonality (e.g. Locrian, Super Locrian). These other scales are completely left out of the book. I would like to see an explanation of when you might choose to use WH diminished as opposed to Locrian, or when you might substitute a diminished scale over major/minor tonality for example. Bottom line....pass on this book. You're better off getting yourself a good scale/chord/arpeggio reference and doing some self-study (I recommend Joe Charupakorn's reference books for that). You're not going to learn anything from this one.

Like other reviewers, I also found this book to be disappointing due to lack of any explanation (as seems to be the case with 'Jean Marc Belkadi' books, I also have 'slap and pop guitar' by the same author). The `diminished scale for guitar' book contains a myriad of interesting and sometimes esoteric examples of the diminshed scale in use (which is why it gets a possibly generous 2 stars). However, this is literally all it is. There are no explanations or *music theory* (???!) pertaining to why the dimished scale functions over any of the examples, neither any mention of which dimished scale is being using (ie C/Db/D and their symetrical equivalents), or which version (ie Half/Whole Whole/Half), which he does introduce, but *very* briefly at the beginning (certainly no guitar charts). This was extremely frustrating at the time. The consequence of this is that the intended audience will not understand how to use the diminished scale (like me when I first aquired this book, and any other reviewer of 'Jean Marc Belkadi' books, seriously, check out his reviews), and are even prevented from extrapolating correct usage/theory from the examples by using knowledge of which particular diminished scale is being used over certain chords (and people who can actually do this must already have good knowledge of the diminshed scale anyway, and so would not need this book - fathom that!). In summary, if you want to learn how to use the diminshed scale, I urge you not to purchase this book - rather than "Jean Marc Belkadi reveals the secrets of using the diminished scale", he merely plays examples with `secrets' in without explanation or mention of music theory - the secrets remain secret! (though we are endowed with the knowledge that he can play guitar in a fast manner) However, in fairness the other jazz tuition books I have used are not particularly clear, and I've had to use a lot of pen and paper to generalise the knowledge provided; my general advice: be prepared to think! (As a side note, the "thanks to" page in the book probably gives an insight into the author's work ethic - "Thanks to: Mareello for his patience in transcribing these thousands of notes" [ie the actual examples])

some of the licks here are also in Jean Marc's "advanced scale concepts and licks for guitar" (which I thought was kind of lame) in this (very) short book Jean Marc tries to teach thru examples only, almost no explanations, very short on theory, just a line or two outlining what's going on ... but still I thought the lines presented are quite good, so I think this skinny book is cool as a supplement but you'll have to analyze the licks yourself to get the most out of the ideas presented here (which is not a bad thing really considering sometimes you obtain a deeper understanding when a book makes you work) almost every lick is in a jazz fusion vein, some are better than others ... what I liked about this one is how Belkadi mixes dimished sounds with more standard chords, so he applies the scale but doesn't really sound diminished like in a 13th flat 9 chord ... while not essential I didn't regret I bought it, just don't expect too much material.