Eric Clapton's 1975 album, "There's One In Every Crowd", was originally going to be titled, "The Greatest Guitarist In The World--There's One In Every Crowd". But Eric's manager feared that listeners wouldn't get the joke.

Which is too bad--because it does seem like there's a guitarist in every crowd. And yet, for every guitarist plugging his Korean Stratocaster knockoff into a brittle-sounding transistorized amp in a Guitar Center, there's probably two dozen more who would love to play, but have no idea of where to start.

It's Never Been Easier To Get Started

Which is too bad, because it's never been easier to get started learning to play a guitar. As with any instrument, beginning guitar is simply a combination of having the desire to learn, followed by teaching your fingers where they should go, and your brain the rudiments of music theory.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, budding guitarists such as Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had little to go on but their ears and trial and error--rock and roll was a new form of music, with little or no written instruction. Today however, it's a different ballgame. For guidance, there's a host of magazines, instructional tapes, CDs, DVDs, and books available.

As for the latter, Ralph Denyer's Guitar Handbook was my personal entry into the world of music in late 1982, when I innocently purchased it one day when sagging off from school and driving to the Moorestown Mall to kill an otherwise ordinary afternoon. Sitting alone in McDonalds after purchasing it, I couldn't believe my good fortune: laid out in his book was a clear and thorough introduction to both the basics of what makes a guitar function, who its great innovators in popular music where, what its most important models have been, and how amplifiers and other electronic devices work.

Perhaps most importantly, the book had a well laid out center section thoroughly covering musical theory as it applied to the guitarist. It began with how to tune the instrument, how finger simple first position open string chords, how to convert those chords into barre chords that could be played in any position on the neck, and how to adopt those chords to altered, extended, suspended and diminished chords. Sections on harmonic and modal theory, lead playing and improvising, and a brief section on open tuning followed.

It's A Clean Machine

Of course, as good as a book like The Guitar Handbook is (and it's been updated since its initial publication twenty years ago, with Denyer updating some of his gallery of greats, and some of the technology mentioned in the book), it can only give an overview of each aspect of guitar. It's a wonderful introduction, not a panacea.

One area it lacks is in its examples of lead playing, which is where Jesse Gress's Guitar Licks Factory can help fill the void. Using a Detroit auto manufacturer as his metaphor and structure, Gress tours assembly lines of licks, ranging from hard and heavy rock, to blues, to jazz. For most guitarists, lead guitar playing is a combination of scales, phrases that outline chords, and prefab licks. And Gress's book contains both conventional music staves and guitar tablature to flesh out the latter. If the book has a fault, it's that some beginning guitarists won't be sure what a particular lick should sound like, and it would have been nice if there was an accompanying audio CD of the licks enclosed.