7-String Guitar : An All-Purpose Reference for Navigating Your Fretboard

Rating:
Summary: A serious chord and scale reference book
Review: As the title states, this is a reference book, not a method book. If you are looking for a more beginner-friendly example of the latter, with mostly riffs and simplified theory, try "Introducing 7-String Guitar" by Dan Begelman. This Andy Martin tome is a serious reference book of chords, scales and modes expanded to the 7-string guitar. If you are familiar with the "Guitar Grimoire" reference series, this book is more along those lines. Not quite as hefty as most "Grimoire" books, at 96 pages it is also no lightweight. There is very little instruction in this book, except for a very little theory at the beginning, which tends toward the more intermediate realm of modes and chord names and structure. Once you're past the "welcome" and "how to use this book" fluff at the beginning, there are only 8 pages with any text at all on them in the remaining 90 or so pages, and a couple of those only have a paragraph. Riffs are equally scarce, with only a handful of examples at the end of the book. The book includes tablature, for those who prefer tabs to sheet music, but Martin advises the reader to not only learn to read music to the point where you can look at a staff and hear the music in your head, but also to ear train until you can recognize a chord and a key signature the minute you hear a song. Unfortunately, this book misses an opportunity to assist more with the latter, as there is no included CD -- not a huge loss since there are so few riffs to demonstrate, but it could still have been useful for demonstrating what Martin says about the moods and "colors" of the different modes (as Thelonius Monk said, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."). This is a good book, as long as you are buying it looking for scales and chords to practice. And if you do earnestly practice from this book regularly, you can't help but improve as a player. If you are taking lessons from a professional teacher, this book should make an excellent workbook. But if you're looking to ease into 7-string a little more gently, or only want to learn via example riffs and an accompanying CD rather than page after page of chords and scales, the aforementioned Begelman book is probably the better choice. It all comes down to how you learn best.