Best guitar books for beginners

[Anthony Scira]

Put all the books aside and go to Robbie O'Brien website and purchase the Steel String Guitar how to video set. I wish he was around when I started. It would have saved a lot of wasted time and materials.

The course is worth 3 times what he is asking for it. Everything you need to know is there and if you have any troubles his private forum will be able to answer any question you may have.

[Julie Moriarty]

I bought the Koch book and read it from cover to cover. I joined the Guild of American Luthiers and soaked up their quarterly issues. Both are very informative, Koch focusing on hard body electrics and GAL focusing on acoustics. But I learned the most from members here and from videos online.

To date I have made three hard body electrics, one hard body bass and several necks for electrics. Every build was from scratch. All of the complete builds are in this section. If you go through them you will see what I mean by all the help I got from members here. I couldn't have done it without them.

[Matt Lau]

Just to add some fish to the kettle:

-There's Neil Ostberg's website on building a traditional Torres classical guitar http://myplace.frontier.com/~nostberg/
- And Kathy Matsushita's website for steel string guitars and ukuleles: http://www.theamateurluthier.com/

Both are great people and do a good job documenting everything.
My only thing to add is that some of Neil's procedures would be much easier to do with power tools and jigs (like cutting the scarf joint on the neck).

[Adam Schultz]

I'm just a beginner so take my advice for what it's worth, but I'm in the middle of building my first, and I have Kinkead, Cumpiano, and Sloane. I started with Kinkead because it comes with plans and he references the measurements from his plans in his book, so he will say "this piece has to be 4 11/16" or something like that, which seemed pretty important to me. You do have to be ok with building a guitar like his though. Kinkead seems to lack detail, especially around the neck body join and how to prepare the sides to get the proper neck angle. I really enjoy reading and looking through his book though. Cumpiano has better information in general, but I find it really boring to read. Sloane is probably the most fun to read, but the edition I have is really old and some of the methods seem outdated. But he teaches you how to make a little plane for guitar making near the beginning. How cool is that?

I second the advice to look around at other forums, especially the tutorials and build blogs. Tons of pictures and info that aren't in books. Its a good way to get a bit confused about which methods/decisions are important though. People keep giving the advice that you should follow one method at first and not mix methods, but I don't think I will be able to follow it. For example, I want to do a dovetail neck joint, so none of my books have a really clear instruction for that. And radius dish building really makes sense to me, but none of my books feature it. So we'll see how it all goes.

One final recommendation. My favorite guitar book of all time is "Clapton's Guitar" about how Wayne Henderson built a guitar for Clapton. No much useful information, but overflowing with inspiration and motivation. I think I've read it five times by now.