Totally Guitar


Book Description

This is a compendium of guitar playing, providing everything you need to know about the world's most influential and popular instrument. It teaches the skills for playing a range of musical styles, provides an understanding of guitar and amplifier sound, and reveals the stories behind guitar makers old and new.




Totally Wired


Book Description

With his critically acclaimed Rip It Up and Start Again, renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds applied a unique understanding to an entire generation of musicians working in the wake of punk rock. Spawning artists as singular as Talking Heads, Joy Division, The Specials, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gang of Four, and Devo, postpunk achieved new relevance in the first decade of the twenty-first century through its profound influence on bands such as Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, and Vampire Weekend. With Totally Wired the conversation continues. The book features thirty-two interviews with postpunks most innovative personalities—such as Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David Byrne, and Lydia Lunch—alongside an overview” section of further reflections from Reynolds on postpunks key icons and crucial scenes. Included among them are John Lydon and PIL, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, and art-school conceptualists and proto-postpunkers Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren. Reynolds follows these exceptional, often eccentric characters from their beginnings through the highs and lows of postpunks heyday. Crackling with argument and anecdote, Totally Wired paints a vivid portrait of individuals struggling against the odds to make their world as interesting as possible, in the process leaving a legacy of artistic ambition and provocation that reverberates to this day.




Guitar Aerobics


Book Description

(Guitar Educational). From the former editor of Guitar One magazine, here is a daily dose of vitamins to keep your chops fine tuned! Musical styles include rock, blues, jazz, metal, country, and funk. Techniques taught include alternate picking, arpeggios, sweep picking, string skipping, legato, string bending, and rhythm guitar. These exercises will increase speed, and improve dexterity and pick- and fret-hand accuracy. The accompanying CD includes all 365 workout licks plus play-along grooves in every style at eight different metronome settings.




Fretboard Freedom


Book Description

(Guitar Educational). This revolutionary approach to chord-tone soloing features a 52-week, one-lick-per-day method for visualizing and navigating the neck of the guitar. Rock, metal, blues, jazz, country, R&B and funk are covered. Topics include: all 12 major, minor and dominant key centers; 12 popular chord progressions; half-diminished and diminished scales; harmonic minor and whole-tone scales; and much more. The accompanying audio tracks feature demonstrations of all 365 licks! Written by Troy Nelson, author of the #1 bestseller Guitar Aerobics and former editor-in-chief of Guitar One .




Tipbook Electric Guitar and Bass Guitar


Book Description

(Book). This owner's guide for electric guitarists and bassists features numerous tips on auditioning and buying a (bass) guitar, choosing new strings, maintenance and tuning, and other aspects that are unique to an electric guitar. This book also includes chapters on the history and the production of these instruments, as well as an index, a glossary, and the unique Interactive Tipcodes that allow you to hear online audio examples.




The Guitar Amp Handbook


Book Description

(Book). There's a huge amount of hype and mythology surrounding tube amplifiers in the guitar world. For years, experts have argued over the tiny details of exactly how they do what they do, and how their various components interact. What's undeniable is that, far more than being just a "loudness booster," the unique combination of tubes, capacitors, resistors, and transformers in these amps can contribute enormously to the quality of sound derived from any electric guitar. In this thorough and authoritative book, Dave Hunter cuts through the marketing hyperbole, and the blind faith, and supplies all the information you need to choose the right amp, and get the best from it. The book also features exclusively conducted, in-depth interviews with leading figures in the tube amp-building world including Ken Fischer, Mark Sampson, and Michael Zaite and even provides full instructions on how to construct your own high-quality tube guitar amp from scratch.




Feel My Big Guitar


Book Description

Contributions by Ignatius Calabria, H. Zahra Caldwell, Brian Jude de Lima, Sabatino DiBernardo, William Fulton, Antonio Garfias, Judson L. Jeffries, Tony Kiene, Molly Reinhoudt, Fred Shaheen, and Karen Turman With his signature blend of genres and lyrics that touch on myriad societal issues, the artist Prince (1958–2016) has challenged and captivated the minds and hearts of countless listeners. Feel My Big Guitar: Prince and the Sound He Helped Create is a wide-ranging collection that seeks to place Prince at the center of contemporary musical scholarship, putting him in proper cultural and political context. This edited volume includes a mix of essays and reflections by scholars and fans, as well as interviews with people who worked with and knew Prince personally. Employing a blend of methodologies, contributors offer a body of fresh, intriguing, thought-provoking, and mind-bending work about Prince—an artist whose music exemplified those very characteristics. The volume examines Prince's musical influences, his rivalries (both real and imagined), and instrumental eroticism. It includes enlightening interviews with early mentor Pépe Willie and Gayle Chapman, Prince’s first female bandmate. These personal reflections and interviews grant readers a unique lens through which to view Prince, enriching our overall understanding of the man. Ultimately, Feel My Big Guitar serves as a space for sharing musicological analysis and memories about an artist whose work has touched and inspired so many. Years in the making, this is the first book in an ongoing scholarly project, PrincEnlighteNmenT: A Study of Society through Music, intended to investigate and reveal the full spectrum of Prince’s life and work.




Play Acoustic


Book Description

The acoustic guitar is the instrument of the people and Play Acoustic tells the people how to play it. This detailed and beautifully illustrated book explores the history of the acoustic guitar, from the jazz age to the folk revolutions of the early 1960s and late 1990s to the current rebirth of bluegrass and the singer-songwriter boom of the past decade. Skilled professional musicians and experienced tutors coach the reader through 11 styles, using exercises suitable to novice players new to each style and working up to full pieces and advanced techniques. Entire chapters are devoted to folk, rock and pop, blues, country, bluegrass, jazz, and more, with detailed guidance through both musical notation and tablature, diagrams, and explanatory text. Accompanying audio also offers listening examples of the most crucial of these exercises, to help players master each style.




Guitar Makers


Book Description

It whispers, it sings, it rocks, and it howls. It expresses the voice of the folk—the open road, freedom, protest and rebellion, youth and love. It is the acoustic guitar. And over the last five decades it has become a quintessential American icon. Because this musical instrument is significant to so many—in ways that are emotional, cultural, and economic—guitar making has experienced a renaissance in North America, both as a popular hobby and, for some, a way of life. In Guitar Makers, Kathryn Marie Dudley introduces us to builders of artisanal guitars, their place in the art world, and the specialized knowledge they’ve developed. Drawing on in-depth interviews with members of the lutherie community, she finds that guitar making is a social movement with political implications. Guitars are not simply made—they are born. Artisans listen to their wood, respond to its liveliness, and strive to endow each instrument with an unforgettable tone. Although professional luthiers work within a market society, Dudley observes that their overriding sentiment is passion and love of the craft. Guitar makers are not aiming for quick turnover or the low-cost reproduction of commodities but the creation of singular instruments with unique qualities, and face-to-face transactions between makers, buyers, and dealers are commonplace. In an era when technological change has pushed skilled artisanship to the margins of the global economy, and in the midst of a capitalist system that places a premium on ever faster and more efficient modes of commerce, Dudley shows us how artisanal guitar makers have carved out a unique world that operates on alternative, more humane, and ecologically sustainable terms.




Visionary Guitars Chatting with Guitarists


Book Description

Visionary Guitars is comprised of substantial original conversations with twelve contemporary guitarists including Noël Akchoté, Magnus Anderrson, Lucia D'Errico, Davide Ficco, Hans Jürgen Gerung, Scott Johnson, Seth Josel, Heike Matthiesen, Amanda Monaco, Pablo Montagne, Joe Morris and Marco Oppedisano.The author skillfully elicits interesting dialogues that encompass technical explorations, questions of method, style, influence and their aesthetic goals and artistic declarations.