Mickey Baker's Jazz Guitar Book - Learn Jazz Guitar Techniques & Chords for Beginners & Advanced Players | Perfect for Practice, Performances & Music Lessons

Neither book is for beginners and both books require a considerable amount of discipline to get the best from. I have given both five stars. And there, to my mind, the similarity ends.Baker's book is very systematic. He uses a minimum number of chord shapes, 36 I think, which are numbered and nearly all occur on a single page at the beginning. Said chords do not use open strings and therefore can be easily moved up and down the fretboard. For each of the keys he chooses, C and G, there are two sets of chords and thus it is easy to play in two different positions for any key, simply by moving the shapes up and down the neck.He gives some theory on chord construction and introduces melody chords, i.e. chord structures which provide a melody by using inversions in which the top notes form the melody. He does not use tablature or provide a recording, therefore the non-reader is at a great disadvantage and will not get very much out of the book.In the second half of the book, with the same rigour that characterises the first, he goes into soloing showing how to make riffs related to the chords over which they are being played, how to improvise riffs that work over fast changing chords sequences etc. Disciplined practice with this book will produce results, and I have found both my playing and my ear to have improved greatly because of it.Jody Fisher's The Complete Jazz Guitar is a much thicker, longer and informative book. It comes with a CD with MP3 recordings. Said recordings are exact renditions of the score they represent and are useful if either you cannot read music or have a tendency to sloppiness.The book, actually a compilation of four separate books in the same format, contains a huge amount of information. He has two different and interesting approaches to modal playing, a lot of different fingerings for scales, many more chords than you will find in Baker's book and a wealth of different ideas relating to different aspects of jazz guitar. A rich source of information.I recommend both books and suggest that if you are going to buy both, go through Mickey Baker's first.