The Scott Henderson Guitar Book Authentic Guitar Transcription

Working Through the Scott Henderson Transcription Book

I picked up the Scott Henderson Guitar Book Authentic Guitar Transcription a few years back when I was trying to actually learn his soloing instead of just listening to him and going "I want to sound like that." The honest answer is it is useful but not in the way most people expect. It is a transcription collection covering some of his more notable solos, primarily from his trio recordings and the Vapor albums. The notation is printed directly with no tablature for most of the material, which immediately makes it a different experience than just opening a standard guitar tab book. You need to be able to read standard notation at a basic level, or you are going to struggle right out of the gate. The transcription quality itself is decent but not perfect. I caught at least three note errors in the "Surrender" solo alone. One was an octave displacement on a repeated lick, and another had a bend height written wrong. These are the kinds of things that matter when you are actually trying to nail the feel. My workaround was to cross-reference with the original recordings track by track, which took maybe 45 minutes total across the whole book. I marked the corrections in the margins with a pencil. The book is cheap enough that marking it up does not bother me, but if you are one of those people who cannot bear to write in their books, plan to spend that extra time.

The actual content is heavy on the Fusion period. You are getting transcriptions from albums like Stratify, Radiation, and some live cuts. The solos chosen are fairly recognizable ones, not deep cuts from random bootlegs. That is both a strength and a limitation. If you want the rare stuff, this book will disappoint you. If you want the ones you actually hear people trying to copy at lessons, you are in the right place. What most people miss when they look at this book is how much Henderson relies on specific picking hand techniques that notation simply cannot convey. The written note might say an eighth note at a certain tempo, but the actual articulation, the way he ghost picks certain notes within a phrase, the slight delay he puts on the pick attack, none of that shows up on the page. I spent probably six weeks working on the solo from "The Groove Merchant" transcribing by ear just to figure out the picking pattern because the notation was misleading me in exactly that way. The workaround was slowing the recording down to about 60 percent speed and learning the picking separate from the fretting hand before I ever looked at the book again. Another thing the book does not cover well is his chordal vocabulary. There are a few chords sprinkled in where they fit a solo, but Henderson's comping and chord melody work is completely absent. If you are studying this book thinking you will understand his harmonic approach better, you are looking in the wrong place. Get a harmony textbook and study the modes he pulls from instead. The book will give you the notes but not the framework for why those notes work.

The paper quality is standard for these types of books. Not great, not terrible. The binding holds up fine if you treat it normally. If you are a aggressive page turner like I am, the spiral would have been better but that is just preference. I would recommend this book if you already have some notation reading ability, you are working on Henderson specifically rather than just generally wanting to improve your jazz fusion playing, and you are okay with fact-checking the transcription against the source recordings. It is not a complete solution. It is a reference tool that saves you maybe two or three hours per solo compared to doing it entirely by ear from scratch. For some players that is worth the price. For others, the effort of correction outweighs the time saved. There is not really an alternative book that covers this same material. The Scott Henderson Guitar Book Authentic Guitar Transcription stands mostly alone in this niche. If you want something more comprehensive on fusion transcription, you are looking at separate books for different players and piecing it together yourself. That takes considerably more time but also gives you more choices on what gets transcribed.

The download link for additional resources related to this book is typically found through the publisher's website or third-party tablature archives. I cannot confirm current availability since those links tend to shift. The physical book remains the most reliable version to purchase through standard music retail channels.