While the encyclopedic nature of a book like The Guitar Handbook forces it to only devote a page or two to tuning and setting intonation, Erlewine has a whole chapter devoted to the subject. He also a full range of instructions, ranging from simple screwdriver adjustments, to fairly intensive procedures, in keeping a guitar up to snuff. There are a few things in Erlewine's book that I'm not sure if I'm brave enough to try myself. But at least I feel better knowing what I'm talking about next time I take my Les Paul or Telecaster into the shop.

3. How to Write Songs on Guitar: For a book on songwriting dedicated to guitar players, look no further than Rikky Rooksby's 2000 book, How to Write Songs on Guitar, an extremely well-researched look at the history of rock, pop, and soul music, its chords and melodies, and how those notes fit on a guitar. Careful reading of Rooksby's book would benefit any guitarist interested in making music to support a vocalist, as well as to best structure a tune. Rooksby, who's taught at Oxford, really, really knows his stuff. I've interviewed him for magazine articles, and was astounded at the breadth of his knowledge of popular music.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of the book is the myriad of chord progressions and chord substitutions over the past several decades of pop music that Rooksby has documented. For anybody tired of playing the same three chords, this is the book to break that habit.

2. Behind The Glass: Howard Massey's 2000 book is a series of interviews with the top producers in Los Angles, London and New York, just as the music industry was embracing the flexibility of hard disk recording. Massey's interview with noted guitarist (Chic) and producer Nile Rogers explores the dramatic potential of this style of recording (and its pitfalls as well), and explains why I was so eager to explore it myself:

The old restrictions in technology forced us to do things right. It forced us to have to make decisions. It forced us to spiritually be so in tune with the other people that magic had to happen. It made you step up to the plate, whereas now, when I go to play on someone's record I feel uncomfortably free-and I almost hate that. I can actually play on a record all day long and do ten different solos and take all these different approaches to the rhythm and all this kind of stuff. And then the producer has to look at all this work like a film - they have to go back and edit and figure out which bits they want to use. Whereas in the old days, when a person hired me to work on a record, I had to get it right, right there. You had to play great, you had to be smokin', and there was no way that they could fix it and make it better.

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