Reading With Your Ears

A certain category of books has a purpose of making your mind sing

Photo by Joshua Olsen on Unsplash

Many of the great composers of classical music were living from writing notes. They might have been music teachers as well, or even performing as conductors or musicians, but they were hoping to get their notes published, much like today’s musicians are hoping for a record contract.

Notes were the way for people to get to know music that had been written by others, sometimes far away. If a composer was lucky, an orchestra would decide to perform the music, which would often add a considerable extra income to the patchwork of income streams. A performance would also make the music better known, which would inspire more individuals to buy the notes.

And notes were mostly bought by individuals. Not to the same extent as people today buy records (CDs or whatever format), but there was a group of people who were sufficiently wealthy to be able to have instruments and lucky enough to have time to play them, and these people bought the notes.

Even though you can still buy notes, and this indeed is happening a lot, as there are, today, many more musicians, and most of them are able to buy notes when they want, the bulk of the music industry earnings has moved to the sales of ready music – recordings.

A development that we have seen in more recent times, is the books about how to play. It may not be a new invention, but the market is flooded with such books now, and you can find a very large selection of them for the most popular instruments, and even some books dedicated to more rare instruments. The wave of self-publishing and print-on-demand has added to this, and probably many of these books do not sell many copies. A few, though, become mega-hits and sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

One such mega-hit, at least by title and concept of the series, is the “for Dummies” series. These books have been around for a long while and cover many topics, not just music, and they have something in common that most other books on the market, especially for teaching practical things, are lacking: they are readable! By this, I mean that you can use them as bed reading or bring them with you in the bus or train, as you don’t need to have the musical instrument by you when reading them. There will be at least some sections that are pure text, to be read and learned from.

The idea of being “for dummies” may not appeal to everybody – who wants to be called a dummy? But it promises that everyone can start here, which is not that stupid. Most musicians are beginners. We buy an instrument because now we want to learn how to play it, and then what? How should we proceed?

The “for Dummies” books give all kinds of information, both the silly, simple type that some more professional readers would consider too basic, and some more advanced stuff. The main idea of them seems to be to give you a lot of different aspects, at several levels, for you to get moving in your new music journey.

Not everything in such a book is necessarily complete, or even correct, and they often tend to be written by people who are known in the area the book is about, such as “guitar” or “music theory”, but these people are not automatically great writers, and they do not necessarily know everything – or they may believe that they know something which is then wrong.

They also tend to be very American. Even though not all of them have been written by Americans, many of them have, and they are not even trying to look out from that country into the rest of the world, to adapt what they are telling so that it fits the situation people there would find themselves in. There is, in other words, a lot of Americanisms and local lingo, and they often refer to places, people, products, and brands that are largely unknown outside the USA.

But for a start, or for supplement, to bring in some more aspects in your learning process, they are useful. I have several of them myself, and I generally enjoy them. I just don’t trust that what is written in them is complete and correct, so they must be combined with other reading.

The “for Dummies” books mostly have a teaching element in them, so you can learn something about how to play the guitar, for instance, from the “Guitar for Dummies” book, written by Mark Philips. It is a solid book with hundreds of pages, and if you buy the “All-in-One” edition, it covers enough stuff for you to be occupied for weeks or months with learning. And there are actually several other books in the series about the guitar or various aspects of guitar playing, so you can get them all and learn a lot, if you want.

But the structure and the way these books are written, makes them less efficient for targeted learning, where you specifically want to get up to speed on a narrow topic.

For this, there are other books. I can suggest looking at the large selection of books by Troy Nelson Music, which have various shapes and concepts, but one of the series is “Learn How To Play xx In 14 Days!” - which exist for several different instruments, and also for more specific topics for each instrument.

I have seen many comments on the internet when these books have been mentioned, and they often go like “You can’t learn how to play xx in 14 days!” – but that’s not the point of these books. They are meant to get you started. And you can get started with anything in 14 days, if you want.

The basic concept is that you’ll have 6 exercises per day, 6 days of the week, and on the 7th day, you’ll learn how to play a tune instead – making use of the things you practiced during the week. Two weeks of this, and you’re done. And you do know how to play the instrument after that, especially those two tunes, which you know and can play both through the melody voice and the accompaniment.

You also know 72 topics, that you have rehearsed during 10–15 minutes each, which is long enough to reprogram your brain from “I can’t do that” into “it’s a natural, I don’t even need to think about it”.

And, of course, if you cannot find the time (1-1.5 hours) that each day’s lessons are scheduled to take, you can spread your study thinner, doing, for instance, half of it each day – and then it will take longer.

Having such short, focused, bursts of study, is a good technique to get you started. Then you can move on with more complex and time-consuming topics after that, or you can continue in the same way, arranging your study time in a similar manner – in burst mode.

Other books are more traditional, with one book covering a sequence of different topics, such that the book in total brings you from beginner’s to intermediate level, or similar.

These are not typical, however, and the kind of book that was common some 30–40 years ago, hardly exists anymore: in big format, bound, with many pages of carefully edited and graphically designed pages – real coffee-table books, actually, but meant for speaking to the musician, making them keep up the interest while having a good experience of reading the book.

It is obvious why it has gone that way: The current books a cheaper to arrange, all the way from writing over printing and selling to delivery, and if you can sell 10 thin books about narrow topics, that will probably earn you more money than if you try to squeeze everything into one, big book.

But there are many books that are somewhere in between: slightly more pages than the narrow ones, and covering more than one topic. The publisher Hal Leonard has very many of such books, plus some of the narrow ones, while others, such as the popular publisher, Fundamental Changes, excel in the narrow ones.

The changes in the publishing industry caused by the internet include a new possibility for self-publishing all-over the globe, with included print-on-demand possibilities. While several companies have attempted to get a foothold in this new kind of publishing, it is fair to say that Amazon has run with almost all of the market.

Publishers in this sphere can be small or big, and I have actually seen some of the traditional publishers also go that way, selling some of their books through Amazon’s sales, printing, and distribution systems.

But it has additionally opened a door for individuals with a drive to begin publishing their works on their own – not having to rely on a big publisher wanting to collaborate on it.

One such publisher is Dave Brown who through his FlamencoUkulele.com site gives further information about his books, and they are all sold through Amazon. Dave Brown tells the story of him once playing the guitar, but after an accident, he couldn’t play it anymore but was able to find joy in the ukulele, and now he creates books about how to play that instrument.

Another very remarkable contributor to this scene is Ondrej Sarek, who arranges all kinds of music for a large number of different instruments, including local ones some that are not exactly the most typical across the world, and publishes these as books through Amazon, while showing examples from the books on YouTube. I am not sure how many books he has published so far, but it must be hundreds, and the number of videos on YouTube surpasses 1,900!

In fact, Troy Nelson, mentioned above, is also in that category, letting Amazon print and deliver all his books.

The development in the publishing industry has created some mixed publications of recorded music and books. While the era of including a CD with just about any book seems to have faded out in general, there is, luckily, still room for such projects when it makes sense.

SevenMuses MusicBooks has made an absolute gem of a little book about the Portuguese guitar, which comes with a couple of CDs containing music played with this instrument, and Fado music in general. The book is dual-language, Portuguese and English, and perhaps the translation quality lacks a bit behind now and then, but the English is fully understandable and the book is very enjoyable. The writer, Samuel Lopes, has managed to collect very many details and interesting stories that you can’t find anywhere else. This instrument and its development and use has been described in many places of the internet, but often with wrong details or a complete lack of such, so this one book is, in my opinion, the most comprehensive and detailed account there is, anywhere, about this instrument, its history, who builds it, plays it, etc.

They have other books as well, all with music included, and I will definitely check out some more of them. This concept seems to have been made possible by the convergence of music recording, book publishing, and the Internet/webshops for the marketing, as it would otherwise have been a difficult thing to create and sell.

Another exciting book concept is “Fado” from earBooks, an imprint of Edel Books. It doesn’t appear on their website, so here are a couple of links to the big version and the small version (with wrong title), both through Amazon (but you can find other resellers as well). This concept is a photobook with music. You can study the history of Fado through photos from the past, carefully arranged to convey the ambience of Portugal, Lissabon, at the time, and what Fado as a music style was to fit into. The large version of the book is full of photos and has four CDs, while the smaller version has fewer photos and just one CD.

Music can be treated in books in many ways, not just as notes, as it was the case many years ago, but now also as instructions on how to play, details on how to use and care for the instrument, and many other practical things – and then additionally this kind of beauty in words and pictures.

Notes can still be bought, though, as I mentioned earlier, and this kind of publishing has diversified – you can still buy books with notes, or even individual sheets, and a large shop with such books (plus other music related items) is Musicroom, but others, like Sheet Music Direct (part of Hal Leonard) sell access to notes on a subscription basis – pay monthly, and you’ll get access to a large number of notes. There are online shops for individual sets of notes as well, typically promising something for free when you find them in a Google search, after which they quickly tell you to pay 5 dollars or similar to actually get the notes.

Publishing is not only books anymore. Publishing about music can include the music as recordings, can be the music as notes, and it can teach you how to play the music. It can take place electronically, on paper, as individual purchases or as a subscription.

If you like books and also music, you have today very good opportunities to find great books to dive into.