You want to write songs, and you want to write them on guitar. This updated twentieth-anniversary third edition of the bestselling songwriting handbook shows you how. Learn the techniques and tricks used in two thousand great songs by everyone from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie to Kings of Leon, U2, Amy Winehouse, and Ed Sheeran. Explore and understand the four main elements of a song-melody, harmony, rhythm, and lyrics-and learn how to use them in exciting new ways. Master song structure, intros, bridges, chord sequences, and key changes. Make the most of your guitar, with innovative chords, scales, modes, tunings, and recording techniques. Use the skills and insights of the great songwriters to create better, more memorable songs. The book gives many examples of classic chord sequences that can be used straight off the page. It explains the basic architecture of most songs. It contains an effective two-part chord dictionary for guitar, providing a set of basic shapes. A second section provides some chords for altered tunings. There are some examples of finger-picking patterns and strumming rhythms. There are chapters on lyric writing, rhythm, melody, and making a demo recording. There are inspirational quotes from famous songwriters, and a gallery of thirty notable albums from which much can be learned. It is everything you need to get started.

Guitars inspire cult-like devotion: an aficionado can tell you precisely when and where their favorite instrument was made, the wood it is made from, and that wood's unique effect on the instrument's sound. In The Guitar, Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren follow that fascination around the globe as they trace guitars all the way back to the tree. The authors take us to guitar factories, port cities, log booms, remote sawmills, Indigenous lands, and distant rainforests, on a quest for behind-the-scenes stories and insights into how guitars are made, where the much-cherished guitar timbers ultimately come from, and the people and skills that craft those timbers along the way. Gibson and Warren interview hundreds of people to give us a first-hand account of the ins and outs of production methods, timber milling, and forest custodianship in diverse corners of the world, including the Pacific Northwest, Madagascar, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Japan, China, Hawaii, and Australia. They unlock surprising insights into longer arcs of world history: on the human exploitation of nature, colonialism, industrial capitalism, cultural tensions, and seismic upheavals. But the authors also strike a hopeful note, offering a parable of wider resonance-of the incredible but underappreciated skill and care that goes into growing forests and felling trees, milling timber, and making enchanting musical instruments, set against the human tendency to reform our use (and abuse) of natural resources only when it may be too late. The Guitar promises to resonate with anyone who has ever fallen in love with a guitar.