Introduction

Face it, being a rock-and-roll guitar player is just about the coolest thing you can be — next to a secret agent with a black belt in karate. But even if you were a butt-kicking international person of mystery, playing rock and roll would still be cooler because it involves art, passion, power, poetry, and the ability to move an audience of listeners. Whether “moving your listeners” means mowing down crowd surfers with your stun-gun power chords or making the audience cry with your achingly wrought melodies, no other art form allows you to wreak such devastation and look so sensitive doing it. And playing the guitar is also a heck of a lot safer than hanging upside down from the helicopter of your nemesis as he tries to drop you into a shark tank.

Whatever rocks your world, Rock Guitar For Dummies will help you to bring the message out through your fingers, onto the electric guitar you’ve got slung so insolently around your neck, and piped through that turbo-charged amp you’ve got cranked up over in the corner. All you have to do now is learn how to play. And for that, you need only your eyes to read the text, your eyes and ears to see and hear the online audio tracks and video clips, a set of willing digits (that would be your fingers), and a little time and patience. Rock Guitar For Dummies will handle the rest.

About This Book

Rock guitar is a specific subset of the larger world of guitar playing. If you find you need some help in the real basics of guitar, irrespective of rock or any other genre, I recommend picking up my other Dummies book, Guitar For Dummies. Now before you think I’m just shamelessly plugging my wares, consider that while Rock Guitar For Dummies was written not as a sequel, it is a very specific and focused look at a single genre: rock. As such, Rock Guitar For Dummies assumes a slightly higher level of guitar literacy (“literacy” is a funny word to use when discussing any genre that includes the bands Black Sabbath and KISS, but there you go). It doesn’t mean that I launch into arcane discussions of music theory or demand you perform acrobatically advanced techniques, but I tend to condense issues such as syncopation and forming barre chords with the left hand. If you find you want more information on those issues, Guitar For Dummies may provide the solution. Besides, the only thing better for your musical education than owning a For Dummies book on guitar is owning two For Dummies books on guitar. End of “shameless plug” section.

If anything breaks the mold of a traditional approach to learning, it’s the pursuit of rock guitar. I present to you many ways to master the material in this book, and I don’t recommend any one way as superior to another. Here are some ways in which to take advantage of the different means offered:

• Look at the photos: Photographs are purely visual and require no text to explain them. Simply look at the photos of the hand positions and the shots of the gear to get a purely visual read on what’s going on.
• Read the tab: In true guitar fashion, I present guitar notation in a system designed exclusively for showing music on the guitar: tablature (“tab”). Tab isn’t your one-stop-shopping solution for all your notational needs, but it’s really handy for seeing exactly which string to play and on what fret. Plus, it works really well when accompanied by standard music notation.
• Listen to the online audio tracks: Some old-fashioned teachers don’t like you listening to the piece you’re supposed to learn. Not so here. I want you to internalize the music in this book through every means possible. Also, I want you to hear the different tone and signal processing represented in the examples — and that just can’t be communicated in the notation. The same goes for watching the accompanying 15 video clips. Seeing a video of a guitarist performing the music examples on your screen is like sitting across from a virtual guitar teacher.
• Read the music: You know that expression “As a last resort, read the manual”? It’s meant as a joke, because often the info you need is right there in the written documentation. And the same is true with Rock Guitar For Dummies. Although you don’t need to read music to play any or all of the exercises in this book, doing so will help you understand better what’s being asked of you and may speed up the learning process.

And finally, even though rock and roll is supposed to be about rejecting conventions, I did establish a few of them while writing this book. Keep the following in mind:

• Right hand and left hand: I use the terms “right hand” and “left hand” to indicate the picking hand and the fretting hand, respectively. Guitar is one of the few instruments that you can “flip” and play in a reverse manner, where your right hand becomes your fretting hand. But with apologies to the left-handers out there who do flip (and therefore have to perform a translation), I stick to calling the hand that frets the left one, and the hand that picks the right hand.
• Up and down, higher and lower: Unless otherwise noted, I use “up,” “down,” “higher,” and “lower” to indicate musical pitch, regardless of how the strings or frets are positioned. This sometimes can be confusing to a beginner because when you hold the guitar in a playing position, the lowest-pitched string (the low E) is closest to the ceiling. Also, the angle of the neck tends to make the higher-pitched frets closer to the floor as well. But most people make the transition easily and never think about these directional terms in any way other than with respect to pitch.
• “Rock” versus “Rock and Roll”: Some fussy professor-types may distinguish between the terms “rock” and “rock and roll,” but I use them interchangeably. It’s a “feel thing” (an irrefutable argument you can use to justify virtually any act or decision in rock and roll).

Foolish Assumptions

You don’t need to have any ability to read music or previous experience with the guitar to benefit from Rock Guitar For Dummies. All you need is an electric guitar and some sort of means to amplify it (either through a guitar amp, a small headphone amp, or even a spare input on your home stereo or boom box). If you know you want to play rock and plan to use an electric guitar when doing it, this is the book for you.

As I state earlier in the introduction, however, rock guitar is a subset of guitar in general, so if you feel you want a more basic approach or just want to expose yourself to more styles than rock, by all means take a look at Guitar For Dummies. Because you’ve purchased a book called Rock Guitar For Dummies, I’m not going to make you mess around with songs like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”; instead, I’m going to let you rock out!

Icons Used in This Book

Scattered throughout the margins of this book you find several types of helpful little icons that flag an important piece of information:

A reference to a well-known song that illustrates the point currently being discussed.

Important info that will come up again and again, so you may want to read this one carefully and tuck it into your memory banks.

Detailed explanations of the trivial and obscure that make great cocktail party fodder, but that you can skip if you want. Just be aware that you may hurt my feelings if you skip over too many of these.

A handy tidbit of info designed to make your life easier — offered at no additional cost.

Serious stuff here that you can’t ignore lest you damage something — such as your gear or yourself.

This icon signals an opportunity to play a complete piece in the style of the exercise or excerpt. You can listen to the tracks and watch the videos at www.dummies.com/go/rockguitarfd2e.

Beyond the Book

In addition to all the great content contained withing this book, you also have access to helpful online content as you work you way toward becoming a genuine guitar rocker. Check out the following:

• Cheat Sheet: Go to www.dummies.com, type Rock Guitar For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the search box, and get some helpful info and tips you can refer to whenever you need to, even if you don’t have your book handy. If you need to supplement your chord vocabulary, the Cheat Sheet is a great resource. The Cheat Sheet also shows the electric guitar with its major parts labeled (remember, the hole where you insert the cable is properly called an” output” jack, not an “input”), as well as a simple diagram explaining tab basics in case you ever need a refresher.
• Audio tracks and video clips: To listen to and watch the audio tracks and video clips I refer to throughout the book, head to www.dummies.com/go/rockguitarfd2e.

Where to Go from Here

If you’re anxious to play, you can go ahead and skip Chapters 1 through 3 and get right to the playing chapters (Chapters 4–13). If...