The Total Guitar: The Complete Guide to Playing, Recording and Performing Every Guitar Style with Over 1000 Chords

by Terry Burrows

Add one guitar and this ultimate course to become an accomplished musician in no time at all! Whether you're dreaming of being a professional, or just want to have fun singing and strumming, you can trade air guitar for a real one with this guide full of instruction and inspiration. The heart of the book: a playing section, divided into 20 self-contained lessons, each introducing new ideas and techniques. And, they cover a range of styles: rock, folk, country, jazz, blues, and classical. You'll start right at the beginning, with how to stand and sit properly while holding the instrument, and find out how to tune it, do fingerpicking, master timing and rhythm, and improvise. An extensive chord dictionary contains over 1,000 chord fingerings. Bonus : biographical portraits of the pioneer greats, like Les Paul, Jimi Hendrix, and Keith Richards, with details of their equipment and a discography of their key recordings.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Reference

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1998

Reviews

[Lyndon Goodacre]

The copy I had (the earlier edition) had enough annoying errors (not actually many) that I ended up not trusting the chord diagrams. Other than that, I liked the book, and it taught me quite a bit as I got started with guitar! Hopefully those errors were fixed in the newer edition.

[Alice inthe Eve]

Picked this up to help me learn guitar. Already finding multiple frustrating things that I find, are not illustrated or explained in a way I can understand and this is just the beginning of the book.

[Peter Donovan]

good intro to the guitar, hard to learn to play from it though, maybe for more intermediate players.

[Ian Kimmel]

Fantastic book with good tools. I am a guitar teacher and it helped me alot.