Gear Secrets of the Guitar Legends: How to Sound like Your Favorite Players

I enjoy reading about the various guitars, amps, and effects that various rock guitar virtuosos use in their performances. I also enjoy reading about the evolution of equipment that these stars undergo over the course of their careers. If you share these interests, this book belongs on your shelf. It is probably the most in-depth treatment of the tools that help these stars create their unique sounds ever published. It is well-written, technically accessible, and filled with first-hand descriptions of the equipment by the stars themselves. It's the sort of book that you'll enjoy reading over and over - I sure do!

Disappointed in that the book doesn't show knob settings the guitarists use to make their unique sounds. So close yet so far...

There were no secrets in here. All of this is known if you do a basic google search.

NCE PRODUCT

Great and very enlightening.

the information here is very top level. A lot of the book is spent discussing the historic importance of the musicians and not on the gear itself. I was hoping to see more technical information about the gear and why it technically makes tone X sound the way it does. This is a fun read, but not for serious tone tweakers.

good stuff

The book is superficial and somewhat disappointing; for example it is confusing and unhelpful in Van Halen's signal path. Dave Hunter's books are closer to what's needed. This book is ok to add to a collection, but not the first book to get.The accompanying CD sounds bad. After gathering articles about genuine star guitar rigs, one editor poured his time and energy into making a so-called sample CD -- using an amp simulator. The CD tracks provide fake, incomplete, half-baked Tone at best. It misleads and misguides beginning guitarists to make them think that this non-range of non-Tone is worth recording. These tone samples are mediocre at best; instead, Dave Hunter's CDs with his good books set a proper standard.Why would anyone ever choose to listen to this fake sound when they could easily put on a genuine, rich sounding record instead? It's misguided to use the opposite of Tone, to create a CD that is marketed as showcasing the goal amp sounds, including actual power tubes and bona fide speaker distortion, which are explained to some extent within the book.What this CD ends up demonstrating is negative: why your tone is doomed to sound like a total uninspired amateur and poseur if you use an amp simulator rather than actual power tubes and hard-pushed guitar speaker. The CD perpetuates the divide between kids' gear and adult gear (per the Damage Control founders who broke off from Line 6 corporation). Actual cranked amps are essential to the qualifications of the guitar gods.This sample CD could be a boon to amp tone, by steering people away from amp simulators, jolting some good sense into them to run out and get instead an actual miked-amp setup, such as a tube power amp and a guitar speaker, possibly in an isolation booth.