Category: books

Introduction to Nashville Tuning book

There’s now an expanded version of an article that used to be on this blog available as an eBook or paperback on Amazon. (I might reinstate the article at some point but it will require some editing, and certainly won’t contain anything like all the material the book does.)

This is a short textbook on an alternative technique for stringing and tuning a guitar to get a very bright, treble-y sound that can be used to create some very unusual effects. It may at least interest some of the people who’ve asked me questions about Nashville stringing/tuning when I’ve used it in performance. It includes information on more-or-less related tunings, and the factors that need to be taken into account when considering setting up an electric or acoustic Nashville-strung guitar. It also includes links to a number of sample sound files illustrating the technique and ways in which it can be used to emulate other instruments.

It’s the first part of a book series called Strings Attached, though it’s more background than anything. The other books will be about albums, songs, and the history behind them.

The book is called Introduction to Nashville Tuning for Guitar, and it’s available as:

  • A reflowable eBook for Kindle, so you can do things like resize the font on a suitable device if it makes it easier to read. It includes links to audio clips.
  • A print replica book – that means you can’t change things like font size, but as well as links, there are embedded audio clips so it can be read even when there’s no Internet connection.
  • A fairly slim paperback version, since Amazon likes it if I do a paperback too… No embedded clips, I’m afraid. ;) But the links are still there!

The previous book, The Vanes of Shrewsbury, featuring drawings of Shrewsbury buildings by my uncle, Eddie Parker, is also available on my Amazon page, as an eBook or as a paperback.  There are even links to some of the security books I’ve written or edited or contributed to.

David Harley

The Vanes of Shrewsbury – book

For some months, now, I’ve been working on a book that takes my album ‘Tears Of Morning’ as its starting point. Tears Of Morning is a collection of songs and settings (plus a couple of instrumentals) that have a sometimes tenuous connection with Shropshire. The book will include most of the music and all the lyrics, but with a shedload of additional historical, literary and anecdotal material. It will also include some songs and verse that didn’t make it to the album.

That’s still in progress, and should be available fairly soon, in fact. However, I got (pleasantly) sidetracked.

Originally, I planned to include some drawings by my late uncle, Eddie Parker, who, although he spent his retirement years in Australia, still had a keen interest in Shropshire history and architecture. The drawings were to be published with appropriate commentary and, where possible, contemporary-ish photographs of the same buildings. However, it soon became obvious that I had way too much material to be shoehorned into an appendix, and it deserved a book of its own.

That book is the small but perfectly-formed (I wish!) The Vanes Of Shrewsbury (a title taken from A.E. Housman (A Shropshire Lad XXVIII ‘The Welsh Marches’).

High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam
Islanded in Severn stream

 While the drawings all show buildings in Shrewsbury, the subject matter extends much further: for example, to the collapse of Old St. Chad’s in the 18th Century, the legend of the Dun Cow, how the Dana walkway is connected to the book Two Years Before The Mast as well as my time working with the security firm ESET, Sir John Falstaff and the Battle of Shrewsbury, and the evolution of the Fire Service. It also includes a preview of the book I’m working on now!

It’s available from Amazon in three versions in order of ascending cost:

Cover illustration of 'The Vanes Of Shrewsbury'
Cover illustration of ‘The Vanes Of Shrewsbury’