Reviews are the opinions of the reviewer only and are not necessarily those of PCGS or its newsletter staff or board. We invite comments to be sent to Karl Garrett. Perhaps they will appear in the next newsletter. We also welcome contributions to these columns.

      Reviewed: Guitar for Dummies "The Ultimate Guide to Playing the Guitar"...."Pick your style. How to play rock, blues, folk and classical." By Mark Phillips and Jon Chappell of Cherry Lane Music

      We are all familiar with those bright yellow and black "Dummy" books that seem to take up more and more shelf space in the non-fiction areas of our favorite book store. These books got their start by attempting to bring the mysterious world of computers down to the level of the computer-timid. I've never liked the idea of classifying someone who simply doesn't know much about a subject as a dummy, but capitalizing on our basic insecurities has certainly sold a lot of books, and a friend of mine was helped a lot from the original Macs For Dummies book. So as I was browsing through the music section, I couldn't help picking up Guitar for Dummies. With the shelves filled with pop/rock, I wondered if this book would pander to that mass musical market of instant gratification, or would there be an attempt to find some truth. Would good technique (we might think of it as classical) be even mentioned? Cherry Lane Music is not normaly mentioned in the same breath as classical guitar, but when they throw down the gauntlet with a subtitle like the above, they are asking for a good hard look.

      As I leafed through the book, I got the feeling from its layout and its enthusiastic endorsement of itself that it was written not so much to tell us about the guitar as it was to get us to buy the book. There are 354 pages in this book. The first 232 are devoted mostly to "cool" looking electric guitars and how to play them (in this writer's opinion) poorly. 17 pages (buried near the end) are given over to classical guitar.

      A great example can be taken from page 28. The picture shows a young man sitting, feet spread wide and flat on the floor, his big steel-string guitar resting on his right leg. He has his right-hand little finger glued to the pick guard and his left thumb is prairiedogging at least an inch and a half above the neck. One can imagine him saying to himself, "Now, let's see, how do I fret that A chord"? But of real interest, is the comment below the picture.

      "Classical guitar technique, on the other hand, requires you to hold the instrument on your left leg, not on your right. This position puts the center of the guitar closer to the center of your body, making the instrument easier to play, especially with the left hand, because you can better execute the difficult fingerings of the classical-guitar music in that position." These two juxtaposed statements, visual and verbal, make one wonder whether there might have been a little contention while putting together this book. This is the only place where classical guitar was mentioned, outside of the 17 pages mentioned earlier, where they give you a quick look at the guitar and a blurb about its technique.

      If you want to buy a book with cool pictures of electric guitars, this is not the one. There are many better books like that and in color too. If you want a general book, discussing how the guitar might best be played, but without getting too technical or mentioning too much the dreaded word "classical", read the next PCGS Newsletter's review.