Biography
Total Guitar is a monthly magazine in the United Kingdom. The magazine is the best selling guitar magazine in Europe.
The magazine is owned by Future Publishing, who publish many other magazines ranging from guitars and drums to video games, mountain bikes and health and fitness. The current editor of Total Guitar is Stephen Lawson.
Total Guitar regularly contains tablature for (Rock, Metal, songs, alongside reviews of guitar equipment. The magazine has many exclusive interviews with various bands and guitarists. The Learn To Play section of the magazine covers songs of varying difficulty. The magazine also comes with a free CD in each issue that contains backing tracks and demonstration tracks to accompany the magazine's tablature and regularly features Video Lessons. The magazine has also featured a DVD edition in two of the issues. Although it contains gear reviews, Total Guitar contains fewer articles than its sister magazine Guitarist, focusing instead on learning material. Total Guitar has the largest amount of tablature in each issue than any other UK and European based guitar mag.
Ex-Mr. Big Guitarist Paul Gilbert has his own column within the magazine, called School of Shred. There have been guest spots from various other popular guitarists such as Brian Setzer, Joe Trohman of Fall Out Boy, Mick Thompson and Jim Root of Slipknot, John 5, Synyster Gates and Zacky Vengeance of Avenged Sevenfold, Alex Skolnick, Marty Friedman, Joe Satriani, Wes Borland, Matt Tuck and Michael Padget of BFMV, and Matt Heafy and Corey Beaulieu of Trivium.
Many long term readers began to stop reading the magazine in 2007/8 after the magazine began running more articles aimed at pop-punk and metalcore bands and started using a generally less mature language in an attempt to attract new, young teen readers. There is also much less difficult material in the magazine. However, following a series of focus groups in the latter half of 2008, there has been a change in editorial strategy. This change is most evident in a more practical angle to the magazine's features. The focus now seems to be on offering useful advice rather than the type of content you might find in more general music magazines. Stephen Lawson has recently taken the rather unusual step of discussing these changes with users of the website UltimateGuitar.com.
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