Trinity Rock & Pop Guitar Grade 1.

Very helpful guitar book

Good

Bit overpriced given amount of pages, but needed for little'uns school so no quibbles there

Really good book this is the best front door to learning rock guitar. Good songs, good backing tracks. I like the vocal singing on the backing track

Great book for first time guitar playing

great quality

My son loves the song choices in this book

This is an odd move for the Trinity Rock and Pop series. The series started with promise as the first exam board to offer ‘real’ songs to play along to. The early grades lacked some of the bigger named bands of the later grades (grade 3 up had bands like Green Day, Cream, Bowie, Kings of Leon etc.) Presumably this was because it was difficult to find songs which sounded authentic and were easy at the same time. However, most worked well and included some old blues numbers and included lots of two string power chords. However, they were good for teaching and didn't sound too twee.The setlist for this new grade 1 book has some more recent songs than the last edition. They would be perfectly suited to a twenty-something, 6 music listener, as there is nothing post-2010 and tend to hover around the trendy indie genre with a few sixties and seventies hits thrown in. The list is very male, (only female singer is Charlotte Cooper from the Subways) with not a lot to attract my teenaged pupils apart from the dedicated music aficionados. However, thinks I, there are some good songs in there and introducing pupils to new music is part of the experience of becoming a musician. Here comes the problem….There seems to have been a conscious decision taken to cover syllabus requirements rather than musicality. Lots more full chords (rather than 5 chords/power chords) have been used, presumably to match up with the session skills tests (which always seemed more difficult than the actual grades pieces they accompanied). While this has raised the difficulty slightly, this isn’t the problem. The problem is they have killed the songs. On the backing tracks all the guitars are played cleanly with a similar tone. Recordings are sparse with no attempt to capture the instrumentation of the originals. Arcade Fire’s Ready to Start, is almost unrecognisable. Jack White’s hard-edged Sixteen Salteens is just plain boring to listen to. If your pupils like the original song, I can’t see them enjoying playing along with the backing tracks.Grade 1 is a mediocre trudge in this new syllabus and disappointing considered Trinity’s marketing blurb which claims they are an exam board which ‘puts performance first’ and reserves a third of its performance mark for ‘style and communication’. In a world where young musicians consume so much high-quality media the backing tracks shouldn't just be tacked on. There are a few nuggets in the pieces which may be useful repertoire but I will probably be skipping this grade. (I hope grade 2 is better!)Other bitsTechnical Focus songs are now scattered at random through the book. Why?Still some terrible misprints in the tab (Bar 21 & 22 on Oh Yeah). Lack of proofing doesn't look good in educational publishing.Song lyrics have been omitted, only small ques are printed. (Does this save on royalty payments?)There are now 8 songs to choose fromThere are no example session skill tests in the book. I presume this has been done so they can pull the old session skills at some point in the future which definitely need improving.There is now no CD with the book. We are in the age of the dreaded download. Fortunately this is relatively pain-free through the soundwise website. No app download required or super-security measures which is a relief.