So, I'm thinking of writing a book

octavedoctor

octavedoctor

New member
I was chatting to one of my customers - who is also a good friend - and I'd probably bored him rigid going on about some technical thing or other and he said to me "you know, you should teach this stuff. There's nobody out there teaching the stuff that you know"

"Yes there is" I said, "it's just that most people fell asleep in maths and physics class and then went home and played football instead of doing their homework while I went home and library surfed"

Time and again, I find myself trying to explain something to someone that I see as very simple - like a difference tone, for example, and why it makes an interval sound happy or sad or mournful or sinister - but I see their eyes glaze over as I realise they don't have the technical vocabulary to understand a lot of what I am saying because I've taken it for granted that they know all this elementary stuff. So i have to go further and further back in my explanations to the point where I'm telling them stuff they should have learned when they were ten years old.

So here's my problem; how do I unpack about fifty years of what has been a very broad and diverse education and repackage it so that it is coherent and intelligible? I'm not sure where to start.

So I thought I'd ask my buddies on here to pitch in with some ideas. I'd probably call it something like "the Octave Doctor guide to common sense guitar repair and maintenance" so the emphasis would be on the practical side but it would be more about getting the reader to understand the problem rather than simply hold their hand through a series of tasks because I think once you understand a problem the solution just naturally emerges.

So throw your ideas at me please and let me know what you would want to know. If I have a framework to work with I might be able to get started.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

maybe you could make a video explaining 'something' to us, then we can tell you if your knowledge is up to write a book about it.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

crguti said:
maybe you could make a video explaining 'something' to us, then we can tell you if your knowledge is up to write a book about it.
Click to expand...

Well I think I've posted enough on here not to have to prove myself to anyone, so perhaps you could leave that judgement to those who wish to be of help.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

^ sorry mate, but I think I haven't read any of your post yet. I didn't want to offend you.
IMHO a newbie won't have the time (or just laziness) to read a book about how to setup a guitar. A book like that would be more appropiate to more advanced readers.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

I say start with deciding who you want your target audience to be. For example if you want stuff for novices its going to need to be very simple english and have tons of definitions. Or if you want to cater to already playing musicians you can skip some of that.

Once you have your audience that will set the tone you want then from there work on each piece you want to tackle. Like say repair start from general to complex.

Just some rough ideas but maybe something to think about.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

crguti said:
^ sorry mate, but I think I haven't read any of your post yet. I didn't want to offend you.
IMHO a newbie won't have the time (or just laziness) to read a book about how to setup a guitar. A book like that would be more appropiate to more advanced readers.
Click to expand...

The audience is there the difficulty these days is competing with the net for general information.

But everyone starts somewhere and there are far more people who want to learn the basics of setup than who want to learn advanced theory on it.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

The target audience is anyone who wants to learn how to repair guitars, or just understand how they work. The 'net, unfortunately is 90% copy and paste so bad information tends to breed. That's not to say all of it is bad but it can be difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff. The problem with the business today is that there is a lot of "received wisdom" out there which by definition has not necessarily been filtered for provenance; people doing things a certain way not because they've thought about it for themselves, but because they've been told that's how to do by sources they see as unquestionable, but I question a lot of those sources...

crguti, you seem to be saying that there is no point in writing a book because someone with no knowledge will be too lazy or busy to read it. That seems a very defeatist attitude to me. No book is aimed at such a person, but that's not a reason for not writing it.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

seriously, all the newbies I know they don't care about setting up a guitar and if they care only ask questions in forums which end up sending the guitar to the tech, or seeing a YT video of how to do it. That's why I suggested a video of yourself explaining something.
Kids of these days don't read books, they want to see a video of it.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

Yes, please!!!! Write a book. I find myself referencing your posts when it comes to some things I might not have a full grasp on or just want to try it a different way.

When can I pre-order a copy?
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

I'm one of the younger guys here, and I can honestly say that I like looking at a book more than the internet. Something about having all the information at hand as opposed to being a few link clicks away and tied to a screen appeals to me.

I think that an easy to understand book with very clear wiring/setup/intonation diagrams would be pretty nice. Like a Dan Erlewine for dummies if you wish to target intermediate musicians concerned with having a good setup and a good sound. I know tons of players at school who have no clue how to setup their instruments, but given a clear set of diagrams they could probably do it.

Which gets me thinking about music education in college- one should be required to pass a course in setting up and maintaining one's primary instrument.

First things first, try to organize your knowledge. Get all the most useful stuff down, categorize and index it, and see if you can develop a 'course' for the student to follow that logically unravels to more advanced procedures. Even if you don't publish it, it might even give you more ideas. Whenever I transcribe information that was previously exclusively archived in my brain over to other media like paper/mp3, it lets me get a better angle and I tend to come up with more things.

Try it out, when you have a lot of data in your head, moving it onto paper can be like opening the floodgates.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

Who are you?

I agree, give me an example. But I will compare you to Erlewine. And multi media is a must.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

You might start with just what a properly set up instrument is and why it's important. Get the reader pulled in as they see practical examples of good and bad. Then break it down into parts...neck straightness, frets, intonation, pups, nut, etc....how to get these things correct.

After set up you could move on to maintenance and cleaning.

End with repairs.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

crguti said:
seriously, all the newbies I know they don't care about setting up a guitar and if they care only ask questions in forums which end up sending the guitar to the tech, or seeing a YT video of how to do it. That's why I suggested a video of yourself explaining something.
Kids of these days don't read books, they want to see a video of it.
Click to expand...

That's the problem. People just want to be shown how to do it. Very often, with repairs, you can't just show someone how to do it.

Yes, I can show them how to change strings in less than five minutes in such a way that their guitar will stay in tune but a demonstration doesn't give you the understanding of why that works. If someone is not interested in that then that's fine but I'm on a mission to get people to understand stuff rather than just know it.

Very often, when I'm repairing a guitar I'm thinking on my feet and the knowledge I'm drawing on is quite obscure in origin and isn't contained in any you tube videos I have seen. If someone isn't interested in learning - and you may be correct that most young people aren't, but who said I was aiming it at them anyway - then there is nothing that I have to say that interests them so they aren't in my target audience, end of.

I asked people on here because I have a seven year track record of posting here, mostly in response to other people's requests for help, so I thought this would be a good place to start. I'm not really interested in why anyone thinks a book wouldn't work, I'm just looking for suggestions as to what it might cover because I have seen dozens of books on guitar making and on guitar repair; none of them explain, for example, insertion loss, or the difference between volume controls as potential dividers or in bridge configuration, or how to calculate the position of the nut when the end of the fingerboard has been butchered, or how to map the polarity of two humbuckers and a single coil from three different manufacturers so that they can be installed without getting the relative polarity wrong in the split coil positions. That's the kind of stuff I need to know whether people want to know...

There was a very good thread on compliance a while back. That's the sort of thing you find in engineering texts books and is very relevant to guitars but which books on guitar technology never cover, as far as I can see. as a result most players are ignorant of its importance.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

^By all means go amok technically wise....
Us who repairs those dratted things, sometimes could use a book, that is akin to the technical ones used in the metal or electric industry schools...
Something that deals with the hows and why's...
And why no two guitar are alike, and how you sometimes must use non traditional means to get the job done!

I would love a in depth going book on that!
Fulltilt learning and all that!
I wanna know more!
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

One possibility for you would be to peruse similar books that are already on the market in the area. Not to steal their info, but to get ideas for format, level of detail, and organization. Figure out what you like about them, what you would do differently, how you can fill a gap in the market or do-one-better what is already out there.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

WHY YOUR GUITAR SUCKS
...and how to make it rock!

By the Octave Doctor


You'll sell copies on the name alone.
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

If all that is explained in your wait-to-be-written book, I'm getting one copy :)
 
Re: So, I'm thinking of writing a book

Vasshu the humanoid typhoon said:
^By all means go amok technically wise....
Us who repairs those dratted things, sometimes could use a book, that is akin to the technical ones used in the metal or electric industry schools...
Something that deals with the hows and why's...
And why no two guitar are alike, and how you sometimes must use non traditional means to get the job done!

I would love a in depth going book on that!
Fulltilt learning and all that!
I wanna know more!
Click to expand...

Exactly. I was looking through my library. Apart from Welford and McLeod, which is very basic, I don't have a single book on guitar making. I have books on Physics for engineers, metalworking, Solvents, airbrush techniques, mathematics and statistics mathematics for mechanical engineers and even one on jet turbine propulsion. I have books on the the physics of music by Helmhotz, Benade and Rossing. An encyclopaedia of Renaissance instruments and books on psychology and peception. All of this is brought to bear on the problem of guitar repair but I don't know how, to quote Quencho92, "organize your knowledge. Get all the most useful stuff down, categorize and index it". Almost none of it is directly connected with guitars. I've lost count of the number of times I've used my knowledge of hydrodynamics to come up with an analogy of how a tone circuit works.

What I want is to produce something that will enable the reader, if they have the will and the tenacity, to understand how to repair stuff, particularly guitars, rather than simply follow a recipe. I rarely need to consult a circuit diagram now because I just understand how these things work and unless it's extremely complex I can usually work out what's gone wrong in a circuit from first principles. Similarly I want my potential readership to understand why a guitar feels better when it's is adjusted a certain way, and understand what the limits and parameters are, so that they can work from first principles rather than simply parrot what they've been told. i see all over the internet advice to set the intonation by using the harmonic at the 12th fret as a reference for the note at the 12th and I know that if you do that, then the guitar will sound progressively flat as you go above the 12th. i can explain why that happens and I know how to compensate for it, but how do I get people to understand it? That's the problem I've set myself. I was never trained to make or repair guitars. I was given a universal skill set and knowledge base which I now use to repair guitars, by all accounts very successfully. I'm trying to work out how I can pass that on and the first stage is finding out what it is people want to to learn about.
 
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