Total Quality (Total Guitar)

Member Name: sickboyedd

Product:	Total Guitar
Date:	25/08/01 (80 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting + Informative, Great Tab, Diverse range of music covered

Disadvantages: Glue on CD might cause rip in front cover, Too hard to find a fault with the mag!

Of all the guitar magazines available, Total Guitar is undoubtably the best. It's one of the few magazines I look forward to coming out each month, each issue having a decent amount of guitar tablature.
The magazine works so well because of several reasons:

CD - The CD on the cover isn't just full of backing tracks for the tab. There's often full songs from new albums, B-sides (Ash's Cantina Band (Star Wars cover) anyone?) and sometimes an oldie. The main bulk of the CD consists of the tutorial tracks which demonstrate how the magazines tab should sound like when played properly. These tab tracks ar usually broken down into a riff by riff approach, allowing you to learn the song in chunks.
Finally, there's the product demo's, where a few new pieces of kit, such as Sound FX boxes are put through their paces by a mad guitar axeman. This feature proved useful to me, as I was able to her what my Zoom pedal sounded like before I ordered it via mail order.

Tab - The tab itself is both plentiful, meaning that whole songs are transcribed from a diverse range of musical genres, and of a high quality. Songs covered include 'new' artists (Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, Travis...) as well as guitar classics (Beat it by Micheal Jackson + Van Halen). The magazine provides for every level of guitar competence, having beginner sections to teach the basics, as well as extremely advanced technique tutoring.

Interviews - Some of the best interviews I have read with bands have been in Total Guitar. Since, I believe, the magazines contributors are more open minded than the usual music press, they treat the artists with the respect they deserve. This, in turn, lets the interviewees be more open, making for a better interview. There's no risk of a "Band X are rubbish" type backlash being printed in the magazine. Some of the coverage may be tongue in cheek (tabbing "Hit me baby one more time") but is done
without cynicism, just humour.


The little things - It's the little touches that seperate the mag from it's rivals. In each tab of a song, there's a little box explaining what guitar/amp/fx setup you should use to get the authentic sound of the song.
The pictures of artists, which are plentiful and rival other non guitar music magazines in their quality, often have quite funny little comments on them.


As well as these, the reviews section is fair and accurate and the letters page always good for a read.

Overall, it's a very good read, the makers of it are keen guitarists who obviously enjoy making it (this shows through on almost every page), and I hope more guitar magazines aspire to reaching such a level of quality.

Summary: