The Recording Guitarist

If you can only get one book about using guitar gear to dial-in a sound, get this one. There are more tricks, and there is much more relevant and helpful advice here, than the other books, CDs, or videos. This book is outstanding for its *relevance* -- the author is One Of Us; he knows the problems we face and tricks to help solve them; his thinking style is solidly grounded in the same reality of the typical Rock guitarist at home. He knows who he is writing for. The book oozes relevance and practicality.The author doesn't know about using a power attenuator as a power attenuator -- only and always as a dummy load. He says to try EQ before distortion, but never shows, like the BOSS booklet, literally running an eq>dist>eq pedal chain or putting an eq before the amp and another in the fx loop. <p>Among all the books, there are only a couple paragraphs that say anything at all about power attenuators (used as power attenuators). This omission, repeated in this book, is odd, given that most of the "getting guitar sounds" books mention the importance of power-tube distortion and speaker distortion. <p>This book, like the others, doesn't usefully combine solutions, like combining the idea of a separate head and cab in control room and sound room with the idea of a speaker isolation enclosure. This book talks about putting a combo amp in an isolation box, where you're using the combo amp's power amp, but it's far better to use a head in the control room -- using only the speaker of the boxed combo amp.<p>No existing book shows the important, basic, and fundamental processing chain: guitar pickup EQ, preamp distortion, amp EQ, tube power amp, power attenuator, guitar speaker/mic EQ. That standard omission, where instead these pieces are scattered across the chapters, shows how far we are from having relevant instructional books about using gear for amp tone.<p>This book has a few brief paragraphs covering: speaker isolation boxes, remote miked guitar speaker, multimiking, pre-distortion EQ, using FX loops to split gear into two modules and recombine, direct inject of a preamp signal into a tube amp's power amp, importance of power-tube distortion, dummy loads, re-amping recorded dry guitar through a guitar amp, and active pickups.<p>In all the books about using guitar gear to get guitar sounds, I put sticky-tabs marking key, rarely covered aspects of amp tone gear usage. Most books ended up with about 10 tabs, but this book has around 50. The coverage indicated by each tab I inserted is usually very rudimentary; when I say that a tone secret tip is mentioned on a certain page, in most cases I mean that it is just barely touched on, with a couple garbled sentences, lacking systematic coverage. This book has five times as many useful tone tips, or 5 times as thorough coverage of such tips. All these tone tips are fundamental and elementary, really, and should be explained to all beginning guitarists; although these are now considered "advanced gea

I agree with everything the August 15, 2001 reviewer said and add the following:I also appreciated Jon's inclusion of the equipment used by studio guitarist Carl Verheyen. I also loved the section that discusses what effect pedals and amplifiers were used by many guitar greats to get their own "classic and trademark" sounds.(Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, etc.)The chapter that shows some personal studios of some famous guitarists was neat as were the quotes from these individuals(Alex Liefson). The book also describes how one can make some great digital recordings when away from home or the studio.If you play guitar and care anything about recording your own music or just love recorded music, this book is a must buy.

All of you guitarists who are into home recording (or thinking about it) should check out this book. It is a very broad, comprehensive look at recording. What's different about this book is that rather than being for producers or engineers, this one REALLY IS sharply focused on the guitarist's perspective. It covers every aspect of recording guitar, and while it doesn't go too deep in any one area, it does a GREAT job on zeroing-in on the KEY aspects of each subject (including some of the juicy secrets and tricks). There's a lot of material covered, but the book's organizational stucture is both brilliantly logical, and simple -- it traces the whole signal path from guitar to the final output media. And the book is so well-written, clear, concise that it also makes a good cover-to-cover read. There is some material geared toward the professional studio session man that is probably overkill for most of us. But in these cases, this is interesting reading nontheless, and there ARE details in the material you can apply to your own situation. There is also material geared to the "home recording" hobbiest. More importantly, there's a lot of info that ANY guitarist will find valuable in ANY recording situation. If you're like me and have spent some time in studios and home recording, there's a lot of info here that you probably already know, but what I found was that it contained a LOT of very usful little details that you typically only learn through experience. And it doesn't bog you down with a lot of stuff you won't ever need to know. So if you're new to recording and feel overwhelmed, this is a GREAT place to start--there's a TON of value here. For me, I found that it reinforces some things I already knew. But since there is SO MUCH to absorb and retain about recording, I don't mind getting that positive reinforcement--it keeps me sharp. But more importantly, I find it fills in some of the gaps and details where I might know something conceptually, but not how to achieve it. And while there's a lot of "food for thought" there is also plenty stuff of a practical reference nature, like micing techniques, tables of delay settings and artificial harmonics, etc.Note: The book is more geared toward more traditional guitar recording methods than to plugging a DMA direcly into 4 track. But even if that's your approach, there's a lot of stuff here that's applicable and worth knowing.Whether you know a lot or a little it's hard to go wrong with this one.