By: James Martin

There’s an old saying I’m sure we’re all familiar with – fail to prepare, prepare to fail. If you’re embarking on a project such as self publishing a book, planning is essential.

First off, as we discussed last time, make sure you know the aim of your book. A complete bible of every aspect of guitar playing is a nice idea, but it’s not really achievable unless you have a couple of spare lifetimes to devote to it.

So, with aims clearly set down, the next step is to break the problem down into logical, progressive, step-by-step chunks. It’s the old adage – how do you eat an elephant? A slice at a time, of course.

It’s at this point you really need to consider your USP, or Unique Selling Point (thank you, Marketing For Dummies). Let’s be honest, music education is a crowded marketplace, and there are a lot of books and tuition aids out there. What’s going to make yours different?

For “Zero Point Guitar,” I drew on my experiences with all the “fiddlier” elements of learning an instrument – the intangible aspects that can be hard to put into words and rarely seemed to be addressed in the teach-yourself books I’d encountered (and with several years in music retail, I’d encountered a lot).

I also drew on my experience as a professional musician having worked the cruise ship/ holiday camp circuit, as well as depping for I-don’t-know-how-many bands over the years.

When you need to learn a lot of material, learn it fast, and commit it to memory, you don’t need extended chords, you don’t need exotic modes, you need the basics of technique and theory, you need a decent ear, you need to be able to “roadmap” a song and above all you need solid rhythm.

As such, I focus on rhythmic skills and basic chord shapes in the first couple of chapters, before showing how to alter the basic major chords into minors, suspended chords and power chords.

The logical step then is to understand the chromatic scale to understand how these shapes can be barred and moved around the neck, and once you’ve mastered moving single chords around, it’s not too big a leap to move up to simple chord progressions like the 12 bar blues. So each step builds on what’s gone before it.

A well-planned book will connect new knowledge to what’s preceded it, helping the student use what they have already grasped to move forward to the next step, and always connecting what they’re learning to the wider framework of musical principles.

Poor planning leads to a spotty, unfocused approach with isolated chunks of knowledge unconnected to any kind of wider framework and simply leaves the student more confused, and more frustrated, than when they started.

So – plan hard, write easy!

In Pt. 3, we’ll discuss the process of actually writing the book and turning it into a fully formatted text, graphics and audio presentation.

Click to read part 1 of this series, part 3 of this series, part 4 of this series, Part 5 of this series, Part 6 of this series, Part 7 of this series, and Part 8 of this series.

This article has been independently supplied by the author and expresses the author’s own views and opinions; the article does not purport to represent RGT’s views or policies.