Product Description

This is the complete guide to playing, recording and performing every guitar style with over 1000 chords! Start from scratch and learn the basics, from holding the instrument to tuning. Then you'll move on to fingerpicking, timing, rhythm, and improvisation. This book contains a playing section, divided into 20 self-contained lessons, each introducing new ideas and techniques, covering a range of styles: rock, folk, country, jazz, blues, and classical. It includes an extensive chord dictionary with over 1,000 chord fingerings and a bonus section with biographical portraits of the pioneer greats like Les Paul, Jimi Hendrix, and Keith Richards, as well as details of their equipment and a discography of their key recordings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1367712 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Library Journal
It isn't often that a book with "total" in its title delivers, but this is one of the exceptions. Burrows is a prolific writer on all things guitar (e.g., K.I.S.S. Guide to Playing Guitar), and his latest covers everything. Part 1, on playing, contains 20 lessons, each introducing new ideas and techniques and fully illustrated with color photos. Chords, scales, timing, and rhythm are a few of the topic covered. In Part 2, there is a complete chord dictionary with notation and fingering charts. Part 3 discusses amplifying the guitar (whether acoustic or electric) and, finally, recording and performing. Sprinkled throughout the text are brief biographical portraits of great players with details of their equipment and a discography of their key recordings. This is an absolutely first-rate production, with glossy paper stock, full-color photos and illustrations throughout, and a quality binding. In all, a lot of book for the price; highly recommended for public libraries.
Eric C. Shoaf, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Not good for beginners, too ambitious
I borrowed this book from a friend and was really glad I didn't buy it. The book aims to be the total book on guitar but unfortunately it doesn't cover anything well. For a beginner it's very weak. It doesn't describe how to position the fingers very well, it devotes two pages to how to play chords, that's it! It tries to cover things like improvising and recording but it just skims the surface. I think a beginner would be much better off with a good beginner book, such as Arnold's 1st Steps for a Beginning Guitarist or Guitar for Dummies. Then if you need to record, improvise, etc. search out books specific on the topic you want. These "all-in-one" books rarely work and this book is no exception.

PS: The fret diagrams are extremely confusing as another reader pointed out. They use 8 lines and I constantly look and think I'm looking at the 6th string when in fact I'm looking at one of the extra lines. The fact that the author did this tells me just how clueless he is! Any beginner that proof'd this book would have caught this as it is so confusing!!

lots of information... but LOADS of errors
I have been playing guitar for more than twenty years and have used many, many reference sources. This one is by far the least accurate. While the intentions of the book are good, it's goal of providing the most comprehensive set of information about guitars and how to play them in one volume must be what lead to all the errors in it.

One huge mistake that was made in the production of Total Guitar was the choice of graphics used for the chord and fretboard diagrams. A good choice would have been to select six lines only to represent the strings, however, they chose to use eight lines. The two extra lines are meant to indicate the edges of the fretboard, but they are identical in width as the string lines, and look exactly like two extra strings. This is EXTREMELY confusing, especially since the industry standard is six lines.

This must have also confused the folks who put together some of the chords, for example: On top of page 109, under "Country Chords" the author intended to show an A Major chord, but the notes shown on the fretboard are one string too low (resulting in an E Major augmented fourth, not an A Major). The A Major is, however, written correctly on the staff/tab next to it.

Not only is that chord off, but I just noticed that the E Major chord shown on page 108 is off by a string as well! My guess is that this is a result of the poor choice in using too many lines on the diagram.

While there is certain information that is good, and there is a good amount of theory available in the book. I think I'll probably toss mine in a recycling because it does nothing more than frustrate me and I wouldn't burden anyone else with this mess. As a guitar teacher, one of the strongest rules I stress to my students is to "Learn it right the first time." This way they don't have to un-learn mistakes. This book teaches mistakes. The typos and numerous errors are such that I have no more trust in them to provide proper information.

I DO NOT recommend Total Guitar at all. Beginners will be mislead and any other players will simply be frustrated. It's not worth the discount price, and not even worth it if someone gave it to you.

There are far better books on guitar playing, but my best recommendation is to find a competent teacher with lots of experience who can show you by example.

Good luck!!

Hard for Beginners
I'm not really a beginner guitarist, but i wanted to learn more on guitar theory which is why i got this book. I already knew a pretty decent amount though but i wanted to learn theory relating to the guitar. This book can be VERY confusing and there are even typos, for eg. they have the A harmonic minor with an A# on the octave in the scale finder. Or they tell you that the difference between the Harmonic Minor and the Natural minor is that you raise the 6th note in a Harmonic Minor a half step when you're really raising the 7th. This can cause people to get reallllly frustrated and confused and have to seek different sources for an explanation on these contradictions. Also, the way they explain a lot of stuff is so rediculously difficult i almost think theyre TRYING to confuse me. But otherwise if you can figure these things out yourself it's a great book because it covers so much.