Customer Reviews

The Guitar Grimoire: A Compendium of Guitar Chords and Voicings

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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This book is just fretboard maps of chords and voiceings. It is a wonderful referance tool and will add flavors to your sound stew. This is not a book to be used as a "How To" or self instructional tool, it's not laid out that way. SO, if you are looking for a way to get through a progression with out sounding like EVERYBODY ELSE this is the book. If you are just trying to figure what a Cmaj7 is There are a number of chord dictionaries that are better suited for the purpose.
Buy this book if you are are planing on going pro, or are seriously into musical studies.
Not really worth buying for the incidental guitarest.

If you're a serious guitar player and you just want to know your chords, this is probably the ONLY book you'll ever need. However, if you want to get the most out of it you'll probably have to (gasp) THINK about it a little. The diagrams show you where each chord tone is across the entire fretboard. So you can just look at it, then place your fingers any which way you want and try to get a good voicing. You want to play a B Major 7 chord? Here's the notes, man. Figure out your own way to play it. If you want to stretch your fingers accross seven frets, go for it. If you want to take it easy and play it in a more conventional way, feel free. That's what's great about this book: It allows you a seemingly infinite amount of CHOICES, instead of just showing you 2 or 3 ways to play a given chord. An amazing book - Ideal for jazz players or anyone wanting to become more familiar with the fretboard.

As you can read in the other reviews, this book is not in any way an encyclopedia of chords (Kadmon offers that in a whole separate edition), this is a book of thousands of charts that show you all of the notes for any given chord and any given place that they occur on the fretboard, thus giving you the opportunity to create chords of your own liking, and also to create different voicings in endless places. As with all of the Kadmon Books this book is not intended for the player that is satisfied with just playing a few simple chords and making campfire style music; this book is more directed at the musician that is interested in exploring all of the small but important intricacies of music.

Grimoire is defined as a sorcer or magicians book of spells and encantations, and with that in mind, the title of this book is exactly fitting to what it is. One thing to keep in mind though is that Kadmon was very smart in the way that he markets his books, none of them are self inclusive, they each excessively explore one single aspect, but if you make the investment of buying 3 or 4 of his books, you should have more info than most people could digest in a lifetime. Enjoy!

PS: Not for the beginner.

Wow - at first it's a little overwhelming, but once you begin to understand (everything is based on patterns after all - it's just math!) it's the ultimate "power tool" for the guitarist who doesn't want to be just another guitar player. I recommend it to all the advanced players who come to me for help - it's been a wonderful resource!

As a spirited collector and enthusiast of the Guitar Grimoire Series, I must say that I LOVE this book. It is a great tool for learning the notes and scales, and it goes nearly hand-in-hand with Scales and Modes. This book goes through essentially "What chords go to what scales and why," and contra positively, "What scales can I play over what chords and why."

Great book. Every guitarist needs this book. Pair it with Scales and Modes and the Exercise book and you've got one of the greatest sets of books out there. A definite must-have!

Tremendous amount of reference material. Could do a better job of explaining how to apply the material.