It’s a great feeling to have completed and put out Road Warrior Without an Expense Account, my first book, earlier this year. It’s a considerable amount of work to publish a book; though I think I always knew this, going through the process personally really drives it home! If you are interested in where employment for musicians is heading, this would be a good read, and it would make a good gift for anyone in music school!

My New Book Nearing Completion

Putting this book together has inspired me to delve into more book projects, and I’m actually in the final stages of putting together my second book “My Car Caught Fire and Exploded!”, which is a tale about… well, you guessed it, but also dozens of other gig stories as well. It’s about 300 pages long at present, and it contains both material you’ve seen on the blog and some fresh material exclusively for the book. All the stories have been reedited and rewritten, and I think it’s got a nice overall arc to it, with the tale of my fiery inferno along a chilly highway above downtown Chicago serving as an undercurrent throughout.

If you’re looking for these tales, you can find a whole bunch of them listed under the blog’s Articles page. The new book should prove to be a fun read regardless of whether you’ve checked out the blog tales before.

I’m trying to decide now whether to put it out myself (as I did with Road Warrior Without an Expense Account) or to hunt for a publisher for this book. I love the immediacy and control I have being able to put it out myself, and as a “new media guy,” I am into the idea of being an indie content producer.

On the other hand, there’s a certain cache to being published by a professional company, and not having to handle every single little detail of formatting, publishing, and promoting the book would be nice. This kind of stuff is pretty tedious to me, and it would give me even more time to work on book #3….

Already Starting Book #3

My third book (which I’m in the early stages of planning) will be tentatively titled Contrabass Conversations, though it may veer off in some very surprising directions and will be based more on my personal reflections on the aggregate advice of all the major musical figures I’ve had on the bass podcast. I initially thought about putting together a book of interview transcriptions but have discarded that idea. For one thing, these interviews are all freely available, and just transcribing what we talked about, while cool (and something that I’d like to offer free of charge on the site from the episode page of each guest), just doesn’t do it for me creatively.

The idea of putting together a straight ahead method book doesn’t really get me fired up either (though I wouldn’t rule it out at some later date). This book will be something that I really haven’t seen before in instrumental instructional material. Building on a foundation of advice and perspectives gleaned from the interviews I’ve done, I’m trying to put together sections like:

• -on bowing
• -on auditioning
• -on choosing a music school
• -on nervousness and stage fright
• -on what to look for in a bass

This kind of thing would be quite valuable (and probably more useful than trying to pick through dozens of transcripts for these pearls of wisdom). I’d also include some of the few dozen double bass pedagogical posts I’ve written, exercises I’ve compiled over the years (that aren’t published by anyone else), and much more. It’s a fun project for me to work on, and it should be a useful tome for double bassists in a format that I haven’t really seen before.

Feel Like Transcribing? You’d Make My Day!

This brings me to the last point Id like to bring up today–I would love to be able to offer up text transcriptions of all the interviews we do on Contrabass Conversations. Unfortunately, I’m one busy hombre, and the magnitude of that task is so great that, quite frankly, I don’t think I’ll be able to do it myself. There’s only x amount of time in life, after all, and I can’t blog, podcast, write books, play gigs, teach and do all that transcription. It’s just not going to happen.

If anybody out there is interested in doing a transcription, however, I’d be completely overjoyed. I couldn’t pay for that right now (though I’ll happily send you a complimentary copy of Road Warrior Without an Expense Account or a Contrabass Conversations t-shirt for your efforts), and I’ll give you full props in the show notes, hype your website, business, or school, or help you out in any way that I can. I’d love to offer these interviews up in a text format as well, so if you’ve got one of our previous guests that interests you and you want to sit down and bang out some text for the show, let me know!