Recording Guitar and Bass: Getting a Great Sound Every Time You Record [With CD]

This is a great book. Ive been playing guitar just for fun for a few years but dont know anything about recording. This book along with 2 others: Sound Advice on Equalizers, Reverbs & Delays (Instantpro Series) and The Mixing Engineer's Handbook, Second Edition have given me a pretty good solid base of knowledge to get started. A good thing about this book as that he doesn't just tell you what you are supposed to do and leaves it at that. He tells you a lot of "why" too, often times going into technical details. I imagine that some people may think the technical explanations of impedence and the difference between tube types are excessive. But for me, going into the technical aspect helped me better grasp the higher concepts. I like the plentiful supply of pictures and illustrations in the book. Written content is still plentiful. A good balance. This book gets bonus points for including a CD. Many books out there on this subject are suspiciously missing this obvious inclusion. Its one thing to be explained how something sounds, its another to also be able to hear it. The CD helps connect the sound with description. There is a section in the back with interviews with different engineers so you get opinions from multiple professionals, not just the authors. Thats a good thing. Topics that are not covered in this book are equipment and materials on guitars and basses themselves. So you will not find an explanation about pickup types or the knobs on the guitars. Although there is an interview in the back with a pickup engineer. It is also light on the effects section, such as equalizers, delay, reverb etc. But there are other books that go into detail about that, like the ones I mentioned above. I was also considering getting The Recording Engineer's Handbook. My friend got it. I borrowed it and skimmed through it real quick. I am happy with the Recording Guitar and Bass book though. The Recording Engineers book is also fine(even though it doesnt come with a CD), but it is much broader. So if you are going to be working with MANY different instruments you may like that book better. But if you are going to focus on bass and guitar, this book is better than the Recording Engineer Handbook one. This book goes much more in depth in topics specific for guitar such as: amplifiers and speakers. Overall Im happy with it, especially for the price( I got it for less than $10 I believe). However, keep in mind this is just about recording. For complete end to end knowledge of the music making process you will also want books on mixing and mastering.