It is possible to learn how to play guitar using guitar teaching books, although it helps a great deal if the book comes with a CD. The major problem with guitar learning books is that you cannot hear what you are meant to be playing, and although your fingers might be in the correct positions, the sound might not be right.
There can be several reasons for this:
a) you are not pressing the strings down hard enough to rest tightly against the frets,
b) you are not picking or strumming properly – your upstrokes and down strokes will give different sounds, and not many books tell you which you should be using at any particular time,
c) your guitar is not correctly tuned.
There are others but these are the main ones, assuming that you are fingering the chords correctly. You really need a CD to let you here how various parts of the lessons should sound. The better guitar teaching books come with an audio disk, and these are what you should be looking for.
A good book will start off with the basics: the parts of your guitar and an explanation of the part each plays in the sound you get. It should then describe each string, and how its vibration is what provides sound waves that are picked up by your ear. The shorter the string becomes, the higher the frequency of the vibration, and you should be shown how the frets work to shorten the vibrating portions of each string.
A good book will then describe how to tune your guitar, and how not all guitars are tuned the same way. Blues players, for example, tend to tune their guitars to an open chord: a chord which is played without fretting any of the strings. The open G, for example, is a common tuning chord for blues players.
In this way you will be able to understand how string manipulation can be used to produced tunes and also various special effects such as vibrato. However, to be shown how to do these things by means of diagrams and photographs is one thing, but to actually hear the sounds is quite another. The same is true once you begin to learn chords. Most guitar teaching books are strong on chords, because they are ideal for presentation in diagrammatical form.
In fact, if you particularly want to learn chords, then a book is better than a video, since you can get chart upon chart of every chord there is, and learn by practising the finger positions for each one. Again, however, it helps tremendously to hear what you should be playing. Nevertheless guitar books have their place, and most of the great guitarists in the early days of the 1960s and 1970s possessed at least one guitar book that used to learn these chords.
Scales, too, can be usefully taught by means of a book, and diagrams of how to play each type of scale. If your ambition is to be another Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton or Peter Green, you will have to learn at least one form of pentatonic scale. These are the basis behind the majority of the high speed guitar licks that these guys can play, and they are generally no more than pentatonic scales played rapidly up and down the frets, using some of the more advanced guitar solo techniques.
While you can learn scales from a guitar teaching book, you will find difficult to learn hammer-ons, pull-offs and slides without some form of video or actually seeing it done properly. Books are good, but have limited uses, and are best used by fundamental beginners that want to get started with some basic sounds before learning how to really play properly.
Guitar teaching books can provide an excellent introduction to guitar playing, and impart theory in a way that a CD or video DVD can never do, but they are weak in terms of teaching playing techniques. If you want to play chords, then they are unbeatable, but if you want to play solo, they are very limited after you have reached a certain standard. That is when you should try a video course, or join an online guitar membership site where you can get access to as many different types of guitar lesson as you need, that cover a wide range of playing styles and types of guitar.
So, if you are a beginner, and want to know something about the theory behind your instrument, and to pick up the basics of playing before you move on to more advanced lessons, a guitar teaching book is the place to start. It will tell you whether or not you are going to enjoy playing guitar, or even if you are cut out for it, and if it is not really you then you won’t have wasted too much money in finding out.
If you are interested in learning to play guitar by video, visit http://www.ijamplay.com to learn more about a guitar membership site offering a selection of teachers, offering tuition in a number of different playing styles.
