Author Interview: Asher Black

Welcome to TRB Lounge. Today, I’d like to welcome the author of The Guitar Decoder Ring—Asher Black, for an author interview with The Reading Bud.

About The Author

Asher Black is an author, karateka, musician, digital ecologist® and maintainer of tobacco pipes of various personalities in Brooklyn, NY. He writes about everything, is a host of multiple podcasts, and (for his day job) connects enterprise sales teams with their audience through sales enablement campaigns and brand story. He boats, dances, and plays with cryptography and linguistics, while reading history and hard-boiled detective novels.

Asher Black is an enforcer for the creativity mafia, plying his art through storytelling (even in non-fiction), collecting oil paintings, improvising and composing for the guitar with the romance of a practitioner in love with the fretboard, and pushing through to zen-like execution of the martial arts. He is a hitman with words, broadcasting from the home studio a continual critique of one-sided thinking, and is known for his raucous sense of humor.

You can find author Black here:
Goodreads | Amazon | BookBub | Twitter | LinkedIn

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Interview

Welcome to TRB! Please give our readers a brief introduction about yourself before we begin. 

I’m a troublemaker, an agitator when I think something can be better than it is, and rebel for the Hell of it, as Abbie Hoffman’s book refers to it. I don’t want to fit in; I want to break out. I don’t care if someone likes me, as long as they hear me. And I’m a human being, which is just a big ape, which is what all we human beings are. That, and I write stuff.

Please tell us something about your book other than what we have read in the blurb?

I’ve always been interested in languages and cryptography. I grew up learning about, solving, and creating ciphers at a young age. The first novels I read at twelve were Tolkien’s works. He was interested in languages, and I learned his runes and tengwar, and would write out things in those constructed languages that he was creating at Oxford. As a young man I spent several years in Korea, which has a phonetic alphabet, and that taught me a lot about language as well. I’ve been a long-time admirer of Noam Chomsky’s transformational grammar, and I think Leonard Bernstein’s The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, which applies Chomsky’s linguistics to music, is stellar.

So naturally, when I took up guitar, I saw possibilities for expressing the disparate aspects of music theory involved as a language. I asked around. Nobody had it. It hadn’t been done. In fact, the last time we had innovation of that type was six centuries ago. So I set about deconstructing some of that music theory and finding common patterns in separate systems of understanding. The result was The Guitar Decoder Ring, which proffers a language for guitar that is simple, easy to learn almost at a glance, and explosive in the possibilities for not only mastering guitar scales, guitar modes, and guitar intervals, as well as generally learning guitar, but for flaming solos, new avenues of composition and improvisation, etc.       

Why did you choose this particular theme for your book? What is that one message that you’re trying to get across to the readers in this book?

Learning guitar takes work, but it’s not supposed to be a science experiment or a laboratory exercise. You’re not a lab rat. The wall charts, diagrams, and other tools that force your mind out of the creative mode and into a didactic one are not conducive to staying creatively engaged and creating interesting work.

We’re at a crossroads, where more people than ever can pick up an instrument and learn music, and even self-publish it on Spotify, Apple Music, or Youtube, but we’re getting frankly a decline in the kind of creativity that made the guitar a seminal instrument. We don’t have to sit down next to a radio anymore and try to work it out, or drive across the country in search of an obscure chord [The Beatles, and it was a 7th chord]—we can just go to the internet or maybe trust ChatGPT. But the result of all that information, in the form of new manuals, blogs, forums, and so on is not necessarily more light but often more confusion and discouragement, given that we’re still using learning methods from the middle ages and even older.

There’s nothing wrong with old stuff. The old stuff is the good stuff in so many categories. But I think a new era and new access to information needs something that addresses the way people actually learn now, and we’re not all belting out motets and madrigals. A lot of us just want to sit down with the instrument, stay in our creative zone, and make something cool.  

What inspired you to write this book?  An idea, some anecdote, a dream or something else?

Frustration is the mother of invention—at least it is for a creative problem solver. I got tired of consulting wall charts, looking up new ones, and printing things out. I got tired of asking if anyone more experienced could see a pattern between the interval values, circle of fifths, mode shifts, and scale patterns everyone is using and hearing the answer: “Not really. This all comes from the historic development of Western music. You have to understand . . .” Do we though? It’s useful, certainly, from a contextual standpoint, to understand the history, but are we stuck in it?

Fox Mulder, the FBI agent on The X-Files, asked “How many coincidences does it take to make a pattern?” I have that answer. Three. Three to at least suspect a pattern, deduce there might be one, and begin to accumulate enough evidence to move from correlation to causation, from mystery to meaning. I set about looking for patterns, like a code breaker or philologist or semioticist might, and what I saw was some rather obvious relationships that were sometimes understood but rarely joined in presentation or exploration. I drew out a lot of these as arcane-looking diagrams (we don’t need more diagrams, but it’s a starting place) and eventually was able to encode them in an alphabet we call SIGIL.

A sigil is an emblem of magic language, but what we often perceive as magic and therefore disbelieve or unfortunately turn around and entertain with magic thinking in the form of belief, is often just a rational, reproducible reality we don’t fully understand. A bit of playing with that concept and we had the name for the decoder ring in the book’s title.           

How long did it take you to write this particular book?

Nine months of hard work. That’s while working as a self-employed sales enablement professional and brand storyteller. It could have perhaps come faster, but there’s value in taking time for learning, reflection, and nurturing a new idea until it’s ready to show the public. I was anxious not to go out and get ‘hit by the milk truck’ before it was published, but I knew my co-author, Barry Gilman, would finish the task if I didn’t, in some form.

He’s now teaching lessons based on SIGIL and The Guitar Decoder Ring at GuitaRealm.com (one R). It was killing him keeping a lid on it, watching people struggle with the usual scale patterns, interval knowledge, and mode shifts—overall command of the guitar fretboard—while we got the book ready. He’s breathing a sigh of relief now that the book is out.

Barry made the book possible in record time by checking things, suggesting new directions, and finding new patterns that I, as a relative novice player, couldn’t have done at that pace or perhaps at all. It might have been an inferior book if we hadn’t paired these two personalities—a patient, dedicated instructor with albums under his belt and 30 years of experience (that’s Barry Gilman) with an upstart, smart-aleck, autodidact and polymath like myself who just won’t take the status quo for an answer. It really was the perfect mix, and I’m indebted to him.

Guitar instruction has changed my life, enabled me to express feelings that were imprisoned inside, because words just couldn’t convey them properly, but music can. What does it feel like—you name it—ache for something, longing, desire, passion, conviction, frustration, the wish to be loved? We could spend our lives writing novels and poetry to try to nail it and not get there. It’s like asking what is the sound of one hand clapping or the mind of a mountain lion with an elk in his sights. But you touch the strings, if you can stay on that feeling, if you can disregard the sterile laboratory charts, and if you have a language, you can make it known if it’s inside you.

What are your writing ambitions?  Where do you see yourself 5 years from today?

Ha. Anywhere I want to be. That’s not meant as arrogance, but I see a world of incredible possibility both within and without. What is Asher Black likely to do next? Anything. I’ve got two novels in the works, one finished but needing the edit, and the other nearly done. I’m passionate about these. They’re intended for the traditional publishing route through an agent, when I find one who’s interested in what I have to share through fiction.

I want to set aside all the ‘science’ work I did with guitar and now go back to just playing for the love like I was, but armed with the extra knowledge and insight I had to create for myself—which I’ve now shared with anyone else who wants it. My musical goals are all about expressing what’s inside. I have eight guitars, several amps, and a boatload of compositions I barely remember writing. I want to be onboard that train until they find me one day, my cold hands curled around the neck of a guitar, or slumped over my desk with an almost finished manuscript.

My great grandfather lived on a farm he built. I ate the best food in the world at his place. He died at the wood pile, and they found him with an ax in his hand and a smile on his face. It’s the way he said he wanted to go—on his own land, working his farm. That’s joy, man. We shouldn’t be afraid of death—only dying unfulfilled and unsatisfied because we never did the things we wanted, never made the sound playing in our heads, never told the story that was meant to be told.

I’m a karateka. I’m passionate about the arts, including the martial arts. It’s not a sport, for me. It’s an art form just like music and storytelling. I take it on that way, with my sensei Vlad, who’s a Ukrainian national champion. I do some exhibitions and the occasional tournament fight, more as a personal challenge than to show off or win a medal. I don’t care about medals. I care about what I can do, what’s inside, what kind of person art makes me. I suppose this passion could sound a bit melodramatic, but I feel it, like I feel the sound of cicadas looking out at the lone tree in an otherwise open field. I feel on fire. I won’t back up from that. Not ever.

Are you working on any other books presently?

Yeah, baby! The novel I finished in about 10-months last year is a hard-boiled action novel. I love that genre—Mickey Spillane, John D. MacDonald. There’s so much opportunity to comment on the world in fiction, and those guys did, that you’d have to write an essay about otherwise. But essays don’t reach many people and land on us the same way. Story hits deep. We’ve been telling stories since we came down out of the trees and built the first fires in front of the caves to drive away the snuffling in the night. Stories of what lurks out there, stories of our contests with it, stories about the lush valleys on the other side of the mountain with cool streams and fruit dripping from the trees, stories of the hunt and the hunters, of our tribes and how we came to be. I think genre fiction in particular enables that in a way that’s digestible to everyone—it’s fundamentally human.

I’m also writing literary fiction. I’m currently finishing a book about growing up in Appalachia. If John Knowles can say what a thing felt like in A Separate Peace, well I have my own things to say. Both of these books surprised me. I don’t think anyone tells you this, or maybe I just didn’t hear it, but I’ve wept, struck to the core by the act of telling these things, of saying the unsayable, speaking the unspeakable, showing the thing that only my eyes have seen. I think if that’s what fiction writing is, the commitment that takes, the courage, then OK, I’m up for it; I took this on, so I’ll stay in the ring. I got a busted rib in a tournament fight. It hurt so much I could barely stand. All I could do was grin around the mouthguard at my opponent and say, “this is fun”. It is fun, but the fun is becoming the person who can say that when you feel it that much. Writing fiction is like that.

Do you dabble in Fiction?

It’s more than dabbling—I’m committed. I want a life of doing it. I think locked up inside of us who are committed to this is a thing we don’t often put words to. So I’ll say it. I’ll go first, in case this is the first time here. I want to be loved. I want it desperately. But I know a thing. You can’t be loved, not fully, not for who you really are, until you have shown the world, or some world, some audience of people who might be open to it, who you are, what you are, what’s inside you.

Storytelling connects with the most basic impulses of the human ape. We’re riveted by good stories, because there’s really just one story, and we’ve been telling it since we sat cross-legged at the fire and opened our mouths to talk. It follows the same basic format every time: an aspiration (or problem), a hurdle or barrier that stops us, and the act of trying to overcome it. This is why fiction works. When we create great fiction, it pulls on the things that make us apes move, literally bother to move at all, to get out of bed, to do anything, to build that fire in the first place.

But also, this is why creating fiction is such a powerful act for the author. We want to be connected—to other people—and to a narrative of what our lives, even if expressed vicariously in the characters, even tangentially, mean. We are creatures built for meaning, wed to meaning, seeking the transcendent meaning of ourselves, the world, and our relationship to it. We get those answers if we stay on the questions long enough, in increments, with bits of clarity coming through like sunlight filtered through the leaves of a maple tree under which we’ve sheltered from the unapproachable sun that burns above.

The act of authorship, of being an auteur, of creating anything—a kata, a song, a story—it engages that part of us that searches for those answers, in a unique way, because the answers are unique for each of us.

When did you decide to become a writer?  Was it easy for you to follow your passion or did you have to make some sacrifices along the way?

The thing no one says, or seems to say, about authorship, and I’m thinking specifically of fiction, not necessarily the nonfiction work I’m doing, though that contains, inevitably because I’m a storyteller by design, bits of story throughout, is that it’s replete with pain. “Do you enjoy writing?” people ask. I don’t know how to answer. That’s like saying, “Did you enjoy Schindler’s List.” The best I can do is, “I found it meaningful, for me and in general.” Meaning is the thing. Not pleasure. If you’re in it for pleasure, maybe it’s a hobby. If you’re in it for enjoyment, maybe it’s a sport. For it to be an art, you have to take on the punctuated nature of it—it has moments of sheer ecstasy, and equal, perhaps more moments of agitation, anxiousness, and reflective suffering.

I began that journey when I decided to engage some of the suffering happening outside the act of writing, locked inside, and consign it to the page for others to gawk at. I started with poetry. I wrote a lot of it. I performed it at clubs. I published some. I burned some of it and nearly had my butt handed to me by my best friend at the time for destroying something he said was property of the world. It’s not. It’s my property, like everything I write, but it was just a draft—an unsatisfying one.

Writing is pushing on past the unsatisfying until we can look at something we’ve done and say, “ahhh.” I stayed on that train half my life. I’m finally able to produce work I feel that way about. I let it leak into the nonfiction to the degree I think anyone can stand it.

I have a comment on being a writer though. I don’t think of myself as a writer. It sounds tough, but I think writers go to writers’ conferences, talk online about writing, shop for pens and notebooks, and build trappings. Faulker said, “Don’t be a writer. Be writing.” A writer talks of it; an author makes something. Butt in seat until there’s an outcome. It may not be stellar the first go, but it beats ‘writing’ as a posture, a lifestyle, an identity. Not everything is an identity. I don’t want an identity. I know who I am. I want an action.

Writer is an identity we put on. Author is an outcome we created, a thing we’ve done, a contribution to the tangible, visceral things in the world. Authors create new worlds, build this one larger. Writers ask authors where their ideas come from. Authorship is a noun, not writership, because what we mean by author is “has produced something another person can touch, engage with, and feels complete”. It’s not a popular attitude, but taking that posture has helped me immensely by being unforgiving with the pose—for myself. I think if I was content to be a writer, I wouldn’t have written anything. I said this to a speechwriter once, and she nearly burst a kidney. I get it. It’s hard to hear. That’s the point. We need to be hard on ourselves in that way to produce anything substantial. I don’t mean beating ourselves up about whether our character is strong enough, or some literary archaeology like whether someone can find foreshadowing or symbolism in our work. I mean we need to be hard on the part of ourselves that resists doing the work. It is work, and work is tough, work is often painful, work is glorious, work is satisfying, work gets us from here to there.

What is your writing ritual?  How do you do it?

I have a day carved out every week dedicated to progress on my books. I don’t say “to writing” because I’m not interested in anything that doesn’t push that ball forward. I meet with two writing coaches to review the draft, and I write down their feedback. If I can, I’ll spend another half-day implementing some of the feedback.

I use Scrivener for fiction, Vellum for non-fiction, but I’m only referring to the fiction work. The non-fiction stuff, I belt out the rest of the week in the leftover time after business meetings and client work, and in between music and karate. I’m committed to no more than five things in my life. I love boating, dancing, and a host of other things, but I deliberately don’t do them for the sake of the things that MUST happen.

No one writes the great American novel by seeing all their shows, hanging out with all their friends, and going to bed on time. There are trade-offs. Five is the max. Most people will struggle past three things. For me, those are my relationships, business, fiction, karate, and music. The reason you have a nonfiction book about music is that it plugs into those interests. I’ll produce other non-fiction. I have some 40 books on my list to write in the nonfiction category (and countless novels) but I do them because they plug into what I’m already committed to doing.

Case in point, I am in business, running my own business, to make the world better. More specifically, I think we’re going to need a lot of new ideas faster to face the challenges coming down the pike. The way I plug into that is working with the revenue side of enterprises to increase their effectiveness—specifically the sales and brand teams—to reach more people sooner and convert them. I work with firms that are doing something a little bit better.

I’m industry agnostic. As long as it’s removing friction from the system in some category, I’m about plugging in. As a result, I see and hear a lot of things, have a lot of data inputs, and can apply those across domains. I’m a native interdisciplinarian (to coin a term)—a polymath. In the course of doing that work, firms rely on me for a variety of insights, and some of those insights have the potential to make things better for lots of people.

So I write about those, and talk about them, and think and reflect on them, and it’s my plan to put out some nonfiction work in a few domains to share them with the broader public. I don’t mean business books—I mean insights about how things work, why they break, and how they can work better, starting with the human ape itself, because effective firms have effective people, and the most effective people are effective on and off the clock.

Other than that, it’s just butt in seat, a little familiar music, a sandwich, and the laptop open with fingers flying. I’ve received incrementally the grace of needing very few things to be in ‘writing mode’ and I think that’s a worthy goal for anyone intending to do this continuously.

Is writing your profession, or do you work in some other field too?

My profession is thinking, reflecting, and creating, so storytelling, writing, researching, talking, and thinking some more comes out of that. I think of it as a vocation rather than a profession, looked at through a broader lens. David Lee Roth famously said, I believe it was in a Rolling Stone Interview, ‘You think we’re this way because we’re in rock and roll. No, man. We’re in rock and roll, because we’re this way.’ I think that about sums it up.

I don’t pretend I can’t help it. I just know what my own clothes feel like. You spend your younger years trying on hats. “Am I a crested blazer kind of guy? Am I a white pants kind of guy?” Eventually you have your haircut, your wardrobe, your shaving kit, and it doesn’t change. You know what kind of person you are, unless you’re one of those lost souls still searching or you haven’t accepted that, if you’re an artist, you’re weird, so is everyone else, but you’re weird in this way, and so you gotta stop trying to be otherwise.

You get that stuff set, unmessable. You become unmessable as Jocelyn Herman-Saccio says (she’s a spokesperson for Landmark Education), and then, having answered the question “Who am I?” to some degree of satisfaction, and hopefully “What is the world?” because you’re going to run smack into it fast asking who you are, you can move on to “What must I do now?” Those are the three questions all human apes ask (or run away from) and we talk about that in the guitar book. See what I mean? It’s a book for guitarists, but guitarists are fellow human beings and artists, so we’re going to tell stories, recount history, make jokes, and yes, share a little insight on what’s going on inside us all.

Can you recommend a book or two based on themes or ideas similar to your book? (You can share the name of the authors too.)

I found Do the Work by Steven Pressfield useful. Quit screwing around and do it. He tells you why we think that and then don’t, and nudges you into a lifelong fight with Resistance (capital R) which is great.

I like Stephen King’s work, because King is a master at conveying what is quintessentially human. Hearts in Atlantis is four books in one, so don’t take it on unless you’ve got the time, but it’s profound. It’s everywhere in his work, but I like that one.

How do you deal with Writer’s Block?

I murder it, salt the fields, and stick around to re-educate its children. I won’t live with it. I write down ideas constantly. I write down ideas about those ideas, and I jot outlines for potential books. More than one can make in a lifetime, but ones I’d be perfectly happy to make.

I suppose this has been helped greatly, not having writers’ block, by some of the things I’ve already mentioned, but I’ve got two other things going that won’t let it coexist with me. One, I’ve got two superb writing coaches, Noah and Matthew who, if I was ever blocked, would act like colonoscopists for the soul. They’d push until I was connected with whatever is driving me inside. It helped that I started by making a list of things I care about. Where the music is playing, I like to say. If you don’t know what you care about, or what you’re about as a person, it’s kind of a lost cause unless you stop and go after those things, which ARE answerable if you have the heart of a lion, as King says in that book.

Until you connect with yourself, how is anyone else, like a reader, going to connect with you? I think this is where a lot of people get discouraged and quit, and a lot of people who have taken on ‘writer’ as an identity sit and stare at the page, or walk around and think of a virtual page while engaged in avoidance behaviors—not just of writing but of personal learning and connection. Know thyself is a cliche’ for a reason. So is ‘the unreflective life isn’t worth living’. I wouldn’t be able to stand it if I had to go to my grave that way. I don’t fear the grave, I fear being that guy on his deathbed. No one ever lies there saying I wish I had made more money. They say I wish I had found the thing and done it. Find the treasure.

The other thing is I created The Black Academy of Storytelling. It’s a ‘virtual’ regiment of self-study—a construct for study—of dramatic structure. It took a couple of years, but I read everything I could get my hands on about the story spine, the arc, the structure, from inciting incident to climax to denouement. It didn’t help at first. It’s not a formula. It’s kind of useless for that, unless you want to write clones. In a way it’s literary archaeology—reverse engineering what someone with the fire inside them did. But I used that study under that rubric or concept to pay attention—to everything—everywhere I heard even the inkling of story—sales conversations, brand presentations, standup comedy, film, music, everything.

Before long, I had the rhythm. I was just breathing it. I knew when a story was working and what was missing if it wasn’t, not by some shake a stick formula with an inner geek saying ‘you skipped the inciting incident’. Great stories can break great rules. But I could tell the fundamental underlying beats that were either there or not and why they worked. I got so I could predict film trajectories a few minutes in. I could anticipate the direction songs would take, right down the drummer’s next tap. I could feel what needed to happen to keep the audience when I picked up my pen. It was immensely helpful.

So, having the fire in the belly, knowing who I am and what I care about and what I must do, and what the world is I’m talking to, and how good stories do that talking, intrinsically until it feels like instinct, I never looked at a blank page again.

I sometimes don’t know how to START what I’m doing. I have a rule: just start. The first few pages are always awkwardly executed. I don’t care. I’ll fix them in the edit. It’s like making a song. You just have to start humming. Your body and mind, your heart and soul, your gut and your bowels know what to do. Just lay down a rhythm and you’ll find your legs.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Nonfiction is storytelling. ChatGPT can’t do that. Not effectively, despite the hype. The glue that connects with the soul isn’t there, just like the air and breathing that Classic Rock has it in from those tube amplifiers, lack of compression, and analog recording feels human, but the super-compressed chugga-chugga deedly-deedly of what came later feels a little contrived, like a computer could do it.

You know, I can usually tell if a drummer is human. I listen to a record and there are microbeats we don’t measure in Western music. Musicologists and music theorists do in Non-Western cultures. There’s a lot of indigenous African music we don’t even have notation to document, because of that. You can hear when the drummer takes a breath—when he’s technically on-beat, but there’s a segment of time smaller than the official time signature, in which that humanity is conveyed. We can feel it, even if we can’t hear it. That’s why that music still is “the music” for a lot of us, along with the great old jazz, blues, and other Americana.

So that’s about AI, but there are also a lot of nonfiction works being put out that are like the backing tracks in a lot of recorded music, as if we’re just phoning it in and it’s just something to happen while the vocalist works. The musicians are optional. Drummers will even go into studios and do a track and the technician will hand that off to an algorithm to produce a perfect, and therefore sterile imitation. I dig Sia, her story, her vibe, a lot. But I don’t like the music behind Titanium. It doesn’t match what she’s really saying. It’s not human enough. It doesn’t ache with her. It doesn’t connect with the ache in me.

Nonfiction, a lot of it, risks being that—purely nonfiction, like a vocalist with a digital backing track. The best work is replete with real human stories and the idiosyncrasy that real human stories contain and convey. What makes something spectacularly unique and human, like us, is the weirdness, the divergence, the universality of the freaking weird. By that I mean open your gut a little. They tell fiction writers to bleed on the page, and I do it, but nonfiction? All you hear is be well-organized, succinct in presentation, comprehensive—Jeez man, that’s not music.

Tell us something about growing up with your grandmother without running water or refrigeration. Tell us about the time you nearly went down in a fight. Get a little dirt on the page. If you sanitize it, it feels like one of those coffee shops that come off like a science lab. Stainless steel chairs and tables, coffee made in test tubes—no one relaxes on a sofa and writes the opening line to the next spectacular novel, poem, song, or nonfiction work in such a place, so don’t mirror that place in your nonfiction. Let your hair down and have a drink with the unwashed.

Thank you, author Black, for taking out the time to answer our questions and for all your thought-provoking and interesting answers!

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About the Book

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