Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57964 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 48 pages

Synopsis
Tired of the old ways of playing? Want to break out of a guitar rut? Learn to play rock guitar like a horn section, or a synthesizer or even like a drummer. Aimed at providing advice and direction for the frustrated guitarist, Guthrie Govan focuses on how you can expand your potential by refining your playing techniques, allowing you to tackle more complex riffs and solos. Using some of the most influential rock players of our time this book explains how to develop a more accomplished style, providing advice on borrowing licks from other instruments and using exotic scales, with each example played on the accompanying instructional CD.

Customer Reviews

Inspirational
This is probably the finest book on guitar playing ever written, im often wary about buying books of this nature as usually i've never heard the guitar player who has written it, and some pretty bad guitar players have written books . You should have no such fear with this book, as it is written by Guthrie Govan who is one of the most amazing guitar players on the planet.
It deals with some aspects of guitar playing that have not been written about before in any great detail, such as emulating other instruments.
Any guitar players out there looking for inspiration, which is hopefully all of you should buy this book.

A great pair of books for guitarists of any standard
Guthrie Govan, who is also a regular contributor to "Guitar Techniques" magazine, and an immensely talented guitarist in his own right, has pulled out just about every stop in these two books.

The first book is aimed at beginners & intermediate guitarists who are hitting creative 'blocks'. Each concept is well explained, well laid out and highly accessable, covering many of the more common questions that guitarists have in a concise, understanderble manner.

The second book, however, is truly scary! Amongst other things covered here are 8-finger tapping, and techniques to emulate other instruments on the guitar. Any advanced guitarist who is starved of inspiration will find plenty of great ideas right here.

The two books (both with accompanying CDs) run the spectrum of every innovaive guitar technique that I can actually think of. Probably one of the best instructional books on guitar that I have ever read.

Where is the creativity?
When I first got this book I was absolutely thrilled; exhaustive descriptions of every technique, progressive exercises from the mild to the truly terrifying, jam-tracks to practise my new-found guitar wizardry over, by the time I work through this I told myself, I will be a guitar god.
About half a year later I'm a little more sceptical.
The problem (according to me) is that the book is a little confused as to what it wants to be. As a technique book the three chapters devoted to alternate picking, sweep picking and legato are totally eclipsed by troy stetina's "speed mechanics for lead guitar". Guthrie's exercises simply do not work on the fine nuances of your guitar playing the way stetina's do. Furthermore the section on "emulating other instruments" is not conclusive enough to really knit these techniques into your playing style. The same goes for the "pick and fingers" and extending "extending the fretboard" sections.
This leaves (technique-wise) 23 pages devoted to tapping. This section is very well developed and the exercises progress in a very logical fashion. The learning curve is steep but manageable and the licks develop certain aspects of your playing while still remaining interesting. One can truly become a tapping whiz using just the information in this book. However, none of this matters because... Guthrie's book is not called "An introduction to tapping and other useful techniques", it is called "Creative Guitar 2"... and in this aspect it fails completely.
Supporters of this book may say "but what about the sections on scales and chords?" Well, funny you should say that. The sections on scales and chords (as well as everything in this book) are very useful to an already creative guitarist, but completely useless to the target audience of this book. Guthrie tosses out extended scales, exotic scales and unusual chords and basically says, "Do with these what you will". Fine to a player of the author's ilk, to whom every new idea is to be explored and toyed with. Useless to the people who will blast away at this scale just like the old ones.
This book may get you out of a rut, but any book that extolls technique over creativity will just get you stuck in another. It is only the truly creative guitarist that progress infinitesimally and this book will not bring you any closer to that goal.
Guthrie Govan is a fine player, and those who share his creative aptitude will be rewarded with many great ideas. But for those who feel they are less creative (the vast, vast majority of guitarists) there are far better books out there to help you work on it. Get an ear-training book, anything by Jon Damian and the simply unrivalled Mick Goodrick's "The Advancing Guitarist".