best book for a beginner?

What type of music?
http://www.skepticalguitarist.com/

Which specific skill are you trying to improve (Rhythm, Lead, Theory, Reading etc)? Unfortunately, there isn't one consolidated book thats good for all. However, if it is lead playing you are trying to improve, check out Troy Stetina's ( http://www.stetina.com ) Lead Metal Guitar Vol 1.

The book is divided into 6 chapters and has about 115 excercises (listed in increasing order of difficulty). The excercises are designed to improve finger strength, flexibility, sense of time, bends, vibratos, pull-offs, palm muting, artificial harmonics etc. Each chapter ends with a song that encorporates all the techniques taught previously. The book comes with a CD and has backing tracks for the songs taught in the book. I think it cost me around $18 (excluding shipping & handling).

I am currently following it and I would recommend it to any aspiring lead player.

Cheers
Vic

I suggest you to check a book by a french guitarist (go at http://www.mega-muse.com ), don't know if it is avaialble in English but it has a first part that without any theory get you started to play the most common rhythms for pop/rock/folk/blues and a second one with a few scales/single not melodies whatever..even if I'm not praticing it every day, I've almost completed first part and I can assure you that it is really helpful

Matteo

I'm with Vic, I like Troy's Books I have the TOTAL ROCK GUITAR Book that I bought early on when I first started and still go back to it alot.

I also found the book "Blues You Can Use". He integrates the Pent Scales into the lessons and for the first time they're starting to make sense.

My .02 cents :)

I glanced at Total Rock Guitar. It seems cool, but it jumps immediately into playing without a lot of preliminaries. It seems more like a fun tour of rock, which is ok, but I think that a more basic book by Troy is Metal Rhythm Guitar Vol. 1. It starts out pretty basic, but will have you playing metal/rock in no time! It also introduces a tiny bit of theory at the same time.

I also looked at Hal Leonard's Complete Method. I like it because its one volume, spiral bound, and has CDs. It teaches you the basics of reading music, scales, and some chords.

I'm doing a combination of both.

Kev,

If you like blues, you might try Hal Leonard's "Blues Guitar" by Greg Koch, ISBN 0-634-03389-1. It was $12.95 with the CD included.

It's not super basic, in that it assumes you know some basic chords and techniques. But I'm still really a beginner after about a year of guitar, and this book challenges me enough. It covers blues scales, pentatonic scales, movable patterns, etc. It includes techniques such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends, vibrato, etc. It covers many styles of blues and tells you who plays/played in that style. The CD has many tracks, some that you can practice soloing over, too.

Out of the many books I have purchased already, this has been the most worthwhile so far.

Good Luck!

Margaret

Playing an acoustic-eventually wanna play the blues but dont want to concentrate on any one genre

Hi

I am currently woroking my way through

Teach yourself guitar by Nick Freeth

A quick google search on Nick Freeth showed me the following link

http://www.allbookstores.com/author/Nick_Freeth.html

Also Guitar noise is the best site to get infomation from

hope this helps

I always like the Guitar for Dummies book...

The everything Rock and Blues Book!