Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Guitar Electronics for Musicians, July 4, 2000
Was disappointed with this book. The guitar electronics theory was fine but the illustrations, photos, and wiring diagrams were not that great. The photos are in black and white and look as though they were from a '60's text book. The diagrams actually look better than the photos.Parts of this book seem to be a compilation of manufacturers' wiring diagrams and manuals, most of which didn't apply to any of my needs. If you're into guitar electronic theory, this is the book for you. However, you may do better with the Dan Earlewine or the Dave Burrlick books.
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Hot Dot heaven: or, Wired, December 14, 2004
I've had this book almost as long as I've been playing guitar, so my copy is battered, tatteredm, and dogeared (no pun intended, for those who know about pickups). I have really mixed feelings about this old standby. Guitar technology really doesn't change much over the decades so lots of the more theory-oriented info in here is still as valid as ever.
Points in favor of Brosnac's book:
1) Good primer on basic pickup theory, electronics, and the like. Lots of info on different types of pickups and guitar circuits from different manufacturers. However, see below under Problems...
2) Nice repository of schematics for old, now rare guitars...not just the usual str@ts (sic) and less pauls (sic) that everyone seems to have settled on. If you somehow have an old Gibson SG-1 or a Les Paul Recording model, you'll be able to decipher the mess of wiring inside with this tome. It would, however, have been infinitely better if all the schematics had been redrawn uniformly, and the manufacturer's pamphlets kept separate or omitted entirely. Also more schematics for other guitar brands (ie Guild, Rickenbacker, Harmony, etc.)would have made this a complete resource.
3) It taught me most everything I knew about guitar electronics at an early age.
The problems are:
UBER-PROBLEM) Badly, badly outdated! Before anything else, we need to drag Donald Brosnac back out from wherever he's been hiding these last twenty years and put him in front of a PC with Office XP booted up, patiently explaining to him that not only does Barcus-Berry no longer make pickups (they're known as BBE nowadays, if I'm not mistaken, and make rackmount sound gear), but no one uses typewriters anymore either, so write, edit, and rewrite, Don.
1) The really meaty, interesting universal stuff, like guitar electronics repair procedures & techniques, basic circuits, etc., are given short shrift. In other words, this book really needs to be EXPANDED and everything gone into in depth.
2) Instead, ol' Donald devotes an inordinate amount of space to now-obsolete gadgets and devices by now-defunct companies--Fre-Ax? FRAP? Shergold?--a lot of it seems to be lifted straight out of manufacturers' brochures and comes off as almost blatant product placement; what's more, he seems to be biased towards two or three particular manufacturers and keeps going back to them (ie he expends a lot of valuable space on the Barcus-Berry Hot Dot piezo pickup which I don't think has been made for a couple of decades). More non-product-specific info would have been nice.
3) The book is just plain poorly written and edited. Donald mentions having written technical sheets at Schecter Guitars, and it sure shows here. When writing for a mass audience, it often comes across as flat, overly formal (I always hate when an author refers to himself as "the author"...why not just type "I"?), not terribly humorous, sometimes confusing, and occasionally repetitive (he actually repeats, in paraphrase, an entire paragraph at one point). He also tends to wander off the subject, not finish what he started to say, and make grand summaries that leave you wondering exactly how the summary summarizes what you just read (example: the "In summary:" at the end of the paragraph "For Lefties and Hendrix Fans"...like, huh?) Finally, although you get to see the bearded, smiling author in the back with all the guitars he's built, you never get the sense that he's a *musician* or that he really cares much about the music, or about guitars as anything more than things to tinker with and add currently-hip electronic doodads to. He writes some interesting stuff, but I can't relate to him as a musician; he reads more like a professional electronics nerd who has meaningful relationships with guitars. (Donald Wozniak?) Read the classic Craig Anderton books to see how musical electronics books can and should be written.
4) Visuals! Presentation! Color photos, or at least carefully taken, well-lit black & whites instead of badly scanned, dark images from brochures. Redraw illustrations. Hire a professional graphic designer (like me, for example!) to do the layout. Oh yes...all these visuals should depict *currently* available gear.
In summary: the Barcus-Berry Hot Dot was once one of the quietest, most trouble free piezo pickups available at one time, although Hendrix never used one because he was already dead, they are no longer manufactured but reading Mr Brosnac's book the author wagers the reader would never know it. (Full intstallation instructions are included in the Schematics section.)
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not a very useful book, September 12, 2004
This volume, which has been around unchanged for at least 25 years, has a little useful theory and some diagrams of factory guitar wiring, most of which have fallen into obscurity as people keep going back to Strat, Tele, Les Paul styles. It is not terribly well written and while the most popular classic circuits are there, you can get those everywhere, including online for free.
If you want to learn to configure electric guitars to achieve goals you want, there are better choices, such as Adrian Legg's book, although it is more a list of things Legg has done rather than a thorough theory book. If you want to have easy access to useful documentation for service purposes, several volumes of wiring diagrams are available from Stewart-McDonald and other guitar vendors. Either way, this book isn't what you want. It should have been retired two decades ago.
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