THE COMPLETE GUITARIST

Back in 1991 I was approached to write The Complete Guitarist by the publishers Dorling Kindersley. This came out in March 1993 and became the world’s most successful guitar book, outselling all rivals for ten years. Les Paul contributed a foreword and the book sold over a million copies and achieved vast numbers of library, school and college loans throughout the world. It did particularly well in the US and UK and I was pleased and surprised. In 2003 it was great to see The New Complete Guitarist and read the first sentence printed on the back cover – “This new edition of Richard Chapman’s million selling classic…..”

The Complete Guitarist has been tremendously influential and many of my innovative ideas and concepts have been adopted by players, teachers and writers. As well as standard material, the book contains quite a lot of my own original approaches to playing and creativity. And theoretically I attempted to break down the boundaries between genres. 192 pages.

BUY THIS FROM A GOOD BOOKSHOP SUCH AS WATERSTONE’S IN THE UK

Astonishingly detailed and gorgeously illustrated

THE TIMES

Highly recommended for guitarists of all levels

THE  GUITAR MAGAZINE

GUITAR; MUSIC HISTORY PLAYERS

A few years later I wrote a second book for DK called Guitar; Music History Players which was an overview of all types of guitar music. Listening to over 5,000 tracks had a good effect on me as a musician. I asked Eric Clapton to write a foreword for me and this title came out in 2000. After this I made up my mind to return to playing the guitar and composing full time and I decided not to take up a parallel career as a writer. 240 pages.

THE NEW COMPLETE GUITARIST

The Complete Guitarist was expanded with an extra sixteen pages, updated and relaunched in November 2003 as The New Complete Guitarist. This new edition was an improvement and I added some important material to the beginners sections and some of my own advanced harmonic arrangements of the standard All The Things You Are.  208 pages.

GUITAR

A small book called Guitar in the DK Eyewitness Companions series came out in 2005. It mainly consists of simplified material from my earlier books and was put together by editors. I added a chord dictionary and a number of other elements. 240 pages.

WORLDWIDE

These titles have sold in over fifty countries and have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Czech, Slovakian, Finnish and Turkish and probably a few other languages as well. English language editions have done amazingly well in the US, UK, Eire, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and also Germany, Scandinavia, Kenya, China and India.

It means a great deal to me that these books help and inspire people and I have received hundreds of tremendous reviews and appreciative emails and letters from people all over the world. I’d like to thank everyone for their enthusiastic feedback.
THESE BOOKS ARE NOT FOR SALE ON THIS SITE. They are widely available from bookshops, internet sites and libraries.