Guitar Heaven: The Most Famous Guitars to Electrify Our World

by Neville Marten

Book Overview

In this captivating guide to the greatest electric guitars of all time, guitar expert Neville Marten selects the most seminal instruments, from Ampeg to Zemaitis, and reveals why each is musically and historically significant. Each guitar is presented with beautiful, evocative images and shown in the hands of an iconic musician to illustrate how, through combining the skill of the player and the instrument maker, an inanimate object of wood and metal...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061359440
• ISBN13: 9780061359446
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 3.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.9" x 12.1"

Customer Reviews

The Ultimate guitar book.

Bought this as a Christmas gift for a friend...he almost didn't get it. Beautiful pictures and greats stuff for tech geeks and great stories about the artist who recorded with each model.

A welcome book that fills a void in guitar history

I have been playing guitar for nearly 50 years. Back when I bought my first electric, there were very few choices of "quality" electrics. Gibson and Fender dominated the field, and Epiphone, Guild, and Rickenbacker were smaller players in the field. Since then, the guitar market has exploded with innumerable choices of truly fine guitars. Who plays what (and who played what) has become muddied in my mind. What was George Harrison playing in 1960? What did Keith Richards play in those first few albums? What is out there now that has the sound I like? Finding answers to these questions has been difficult, even with Wikipedia and Google to help me. I read 5 books on the Beatles and found out everything I really didn't want to know (their personal experiences but not their music making). This book includes a lot of information that I already knew, but finding that information was not easy nor was the information authoritative, much of it coming from people's posts on forums. This beautiful and very reasonably-priced book is all about the fine guitars of the last half century and the people who played them. It is the book that musicians want, and probably would appeal less to non-musician rock fans. Why all of the attention to the instruments? Unlike pianos, flutes, and trumpets, different electric guitars sound very, very different. I can think of no other musical instrument that takes on so many different shapes, sizes, looks, forms, sounds, weights, and sounds. And those guitars can be tweaked to sound a bit different (as John Lennon did to his Epiphone Casino, sanding off the finish and applying only a protective layer of lacquer). This is the ultimate coffee table book for me. While not as large or thick as some guitar "encyclopedias", I can pick this book up and read through the descriptions and histories again and again, and they evoke fond memories of music that has surrounded me for 5 decades. One omission that surprised me was the lack of mention of Mosrite, the guitar of the Ventures after they switched from Fender. But those guitars are barely in production now and are more likely to be collector's items, so I guess I can forgive the author on this one.

What a wonderful book!

I happened across this book quite by accident but, as a budding guitarist, purchased a copy because I thought it might help me better understand the wide variety of electric guitars out there and their unique sounds. Not only did it fulfill this objective but it also provided me with hours of enjoyment. This was a real page turner. One after another, the reader gets beautiful photography and an excellent description of the best guitars we've all heard as far back as the 50's. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in guitars. Thank you, Neville. I've read a lot of books about guitars and I regard this to be one of the best. Thoroughly enjoyable!

Great Book!

Guitar Heaven: The Most Famous Guitars to Electrify Our World I bought this book for my husband as a Christmas gift and he absolutely loves it! The pictures are terrific. I would recommend this book to anyone who is a guitar fanatic!