How to Start a Magazine

March 20th, 2008

Just about every time I meet one of our readers, I’m asked how Jason and I came up with the idea to start The Fretboard Journal. The short answer is that we wanted to produce a magazine devoted to the musicians that performed the music we loved and the luthiers that built the instruments they used to make that music. Since we were both players of limited ability and had both worked on guitars with varying degrees of success, we knew how hard it was to play music well and how tricky it was to fix an instrument, let alone build one from scratch. We wanted to produce something to pay tribute to the players and builders we admired and we were determined to create a magazine that reflected the care and effort that musicians and luthiers put into their work.

The long answer involves the fact that Jason plays the musical saw, but it takes a while to get there so please be patient. (The images in this post are from the pre-launch days and show some of the design ideas we ultimately rejected. For reasons that are now obscure to me, we called the process of choosing the cover and logo designs worm-farming.)

About ten years ago I was just starting to write articles for Fiddler Magazine and Acoustic Guitar. I was working at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto at the time and I wanted to share some of the knowledge I had picked up after years of buying, selling, coveting and accumulating fretted instruments. Being a novice writer, I decided to follow the hoary advice about writing about what you know. Consequently, my first article for Acoustic Guitar was titled, “The Top Ten Songs that People Who Work in Guitar Stores Never Want to Hear Again.” After publishing it, the magazine received lots of letters from outraged readers complaining about how I had maligned their favorite songs. While I was a bit upset by the outcry, I ultimately decided that negative attention was better than no attention at all and I eventually left Gryphon to become a full-time freelance writer.

At the same time, Jason was an editor at Pulse!, the in-store magazine produced by Tower Records. Like me, he was obsessed with music and instruments and along with writing about it, he played guitar, tenor guitar and musical saw at various venues around Sacramento. One of the contributors to Pulse! was Robert Armstrong, the cracked genius who created the underground comic character Mickey Rat and co-founded, with Robert Crumb and Al Dodge, the Cheap Suit Serenaders, one of the most entertaining acoustic string bands I’ve ever seen. Along with being a great cartoonist and illustrator Armstrong is an excellent musician who plays guitar, steel guitar, mandolin, ukulele and musical saw. Armstrong was doing illustrations for Jason at Pulse!, the subject of musical saw came up and before long Jason was taking lessons and learning all about vintage Mussehl & Westphal musical saws from Armstrong.

I knew Robert Armstrong through Gryphon. Armstrong was a long-time crony of the store and we struck up a friendship during his occasional visits. One day, Armstrong called me and said that Jason wanted him to review a book about Martin guitars. He didn’t feel that he knew enough about the subject and did I want to do it. I told him yes and a week or so later I had written my first article for Jason. Then he vanished.

A few months later Jason tuned up in Seattle as a music editor at a little dot-com called Amazon. Jason got back in touch saying he was looking for reviewers and over the next couple of years I wrote a couple of hundred CD reviews. During that time we discovered our taste in music was very similar and included things like The Conet Project, the collection of Numbers Station recordings that inspired Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the recordings of the viol de gambist Jordi Savall, the guitar playing of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and ukulele music of all sorts. We also discovered that we shared an interest in good non-fiction writing, fine printing and well-produced books. Jason had studied the art of working a letterpress with Peter Koch while my mother had worked as a bookbinder and a dealer in antiquarian books. We also loved fretted instruments of all sorts.

During Jason’s tenure at Amazon, we would complain about our respective work lives. I would moan about the uncertainty of the freelancer’s lot and the solitude while he would kvetch about how he was being sucked into middle management and how there were too many other people in the office. In 2002 we decided to produce a chapbook devoted to the tiple, a 10-string cousin of the ukulele. The idea would be that I would research and write the article and Jason would print it on the letterpress that a friend was storing in his garage. I mentioned this project to a few friends and it turned out a few of them had stories about ukes they wanted us to print and before we knew it, the little eight-page project that we using to keep us from going insane in our working lives had grown into a 128-page magazine called the Ukulele Occasional. We had 2000 copies printed up and we figured we would give most of them away to our buddies, but to our surprise we wound up selling most of them. A few months later we put out a second issue, which also sold pretty well.

Then we started getting requests to do a magazine devoted to mandolin, guitar, banjo and steel guitar. We actually started putting together an issue of the Tenor Guitar Occasional before we realized that if we combined all the instruments into one issue, it would save us a lot of bother. After all, if we liked all of this stuff, then there must be folks out there that liked it all too. And so The Fretboard Journal was sort of born. Over the next few months Jason and I went on a magazine buying binge to see what was out there and what was selling. Jason discovered The Surfer’s Journal, a beautifully produced magazine devoted to, well, surfing. The SJ had long articles, loads of great photos and not very many ads. (Sound familiar?)

Jason and I spent more than a year researching the magazine business, doing cover mock-ups, brainstorming story ideas and talking, talking and talking some more about our plans for our magazine. One day my wife gave me an ultimatum, either Jason and I launch The Fretboard Journal or I shut up and stop talking about it. So we found Patrick Barber and Holly McGuire to help us design it and Marc Greilsamer to help us edit it and we jumped in with both feet.

Our goal was to produce a reader supported magazine, one that didn’t depend on advertisers to survive. We felt that would help us maintain our editorial independence and allow us to cover subjects that the other music magazines wouldn’t. We also thought this model would keep us more in touch with our readers, which, judging from the many long and thoughtful letters we receive, seems to have made the right decision.-MJS

Entry Filed under: FJ Information