GUITAR LESSON BOOKS

A good book will start off with the basics: the parts of your guitar and an explanation of the part each plays in the sound you get.

A fine example is The Hal Leonard Acoustic Guitar Method: A Complete Guide with Step-by-Step Lessons and 45 Great Acoustic Songs

A good book will describe how to tune your guitar, and how not all guitars are tuned the same way. Blues players, for example, tend to tune their guitars to an open chord: a chord which is played without fretting any of the strings. The open G, for example, is a common tuning chord for blues players.

In this way you will be able to understand how string manipulation can be used to produced tunes and also various special effects such as vibrato. However, to be shown how to do these things by means of diagrams and photographs is one thing, but to actually hear the sounds is quite another.



The same is true once you begin to learn chords. Most guitar teaching books are strong on chords, because they are ideal for presentation in diagrammatical form.

In fact, if you particularly want to learn chords, then a book is better than a video, since you can get chart upon chart of every chord there is, and learn by practising the finger positions for each one. Again, however, it helps tremendously to hear what you should be playing.

Nevertheless guitar books have their place, and most of the great guitarists in the early days of the 1960s and 1970s possessed at least one guitar book that used to learn these chords.