Want a book for Christmas? Tony Bacon sorts through a pile of print and helps you with the choice.

Laurence Canty "How To Play Bass Guitar"
(Elm Tree, 100 pages, paperback £4.95, ISBN 0-241-11078-5.)

Hugh Hopper "The Rock Bass Manual"
(Portland, 112 pages, paperback £3.95, ISBN 0-907937-16-0.)

Here are two relatively straightforward attempts to guide the beginner into playing better bass guitar. Hopper is a player — his most notable period was with Soft Machine some 15 years ago — and his book has plenty of musical examples from fellow players he considers to be important and worth examining, as opposed to Canty's more considered and tightly ordered, if musically isolated, format. Canty is a teacher and a player.

But Canty's book has been more clearly thought out, it would seem, and aims chapters at different levels of knowledge and requirements from the student. Hopper's, on the other hand, seems to present things more or less as they occur to the writer, with the result that working right through the book would be an entertaining if slightly wearing activity.

But there is a more friendly feel to Hopper's manual as a result — you do actually get the feeling that an enthusiastic bassist is rabbiting on to you about his views on how and what you should learn to play. Canty is drier and more academic.

Both the bassists cover all the usual tutor-book subjects like scales, exercises, harmony, playing tricks, specific techniques, fingering and tuning, but Canty's is the scheme which offers more direct and easily-found answers to particular problems, and which more quickly gets you down to serious playing at a level which you feel capable of dealing with.

Hopper appears more insistent on the necessity of reading music, even if he doesn't actually say so. The bulk of the examples in the book are in notation form — when you know it, the easiest way of communicating musical ideas. Canty at least offers one substantial chapter of five where he specifically acknowledges the fact that you may not want to deal with notation, for "the player who has progressed as far as possible without help".

Brief areas in both books also deal with equipment maintenance — again, Canty seems most helpful here and more up to date, while Hopper gets sidetracked into areas like home recording which he can't hope to deal with properly in the limited space. Both books wander in these sections: they really should have stuck to fingers and notes, which is what they do best.

So, we'd buy Canty's guide as a specific teaching book, while Hopper's manual would be worth getting out of the library for an interesting browse.

"Rockschool: Guitar, Bass, Drums"
(BBC, 192 pages, paperback £8.50, ISBN 0-563-21059-1.)

The Rockschool book succeeds in translating the essential idea of the TV series — unpretentious and useful coaching on playing electric guitar, electric bass and drums — into the printed page. Keyboardists, avant-garde jazzers and mere vocalists can leave now. For the rest of us, it's £8.50 well spent.

The main written addition to the TV programme's scheme is two chapters on guitar/bass and drum hardware: the guitar section is too long and mentions rather too many Sixties players, while the drum bit is more concise and sticks usefully to the equipment. The technique chapters follow, written by the relevant TV presenters (who are, first and foremost, working musicians). These items are clearly written and laid out with enough in each to get you up and running, but by far the most useful parts of the book are those chapters nearer the back on playing together in different styles, encouraging group harmony and inter-involvement.

And the book is not totally redundant for those with a more mechanical view of playing music: lots of drum patterns are notated which, with a bit of practice, can be worked into very handy drum machine programs.

Despite excuses about the problems of keeping up with fast-moving technology and of teaching techniques, keyboards should have been included in the project. They leave a sore gap. But the book will prove to be an invaluable provocation for any group member who plays guitar, bass or drums. There's nothing else like it.

Michael Norman and Ben Dickey "The Complete Synthesiser Handbook"
(Zomba, 140 pages, paperback £4.95, ISBN 0-946391-35-1.)

David Crombie "The Synthesizer & Electronic Keyboard Handbook"
(Dorling Kindersley, 160 pages, hardback £9.95, ISBN 09-86318-076-0.)

The titles are similar, but the books could not be more varied in treatment and presentation. Norman and Dickey's book is amateurishly produced, with a cheap line-drawn pink cover and a similar lack of imagination inside. The content is better, if rambling.

Encouragingly, Norman and Dickey scoot rapidly through history and development of synths and get down to the important matter of making the noises, taking us on a haphazard tour through the potential rackets of Minimoogs, DXs, Synthaxes and percussion machines, and dwelling constructively on the linkage of these devices (MIDI is too hurried to make much sense, but there's a tempting plug for the Dr Click system).

The practical section that follows is a stronger constituent — a fascinating if rather matter-of-factly written account of the recording of Heaven 17's "Temptation", complete with original track sheets, fills eight pages, followed by a report on Vince Clarke using his Fairlight in the studio one day.

Another good idea appears toward the end when Billy Currie's score for the middle of "Vienna" is reproduced alongside his explanation of live performance of the piece. A few more very short interviews with Martin Rushent, Conny Plank and the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart close the book, and one is left with the impression that the writers weren't at all sure what they were hoping to achieve with this work. Is it a book to help you play synths, or is it a book about how musicians and studio people use them? Is it a How To or a How Did... ? The clumsy writing and indifferent presentation do nothing to clarify the intentions.

Crombie's book is, on the face of it, a more professional job, although I personally find the presentation — a large coffee-table-type effort — rather formal and formularised. The idea is to cover all aspects of the instruments — it's from the same stable as Ralph Denyer's excellent "Guitar Handbook" reviewed here last year.

The brief guide to significant players (from Scott Joplin to Tom Dolby) could usefully have been omitted: it's uncritical and bland. "Annie Lennox adopted an asexual persona, projecting her haunted vocals over Dave Stewart's original brand of electronic keyboard playing," for example. The instrument section is better, covering pianos to computers in a factual and reasonably informative manner.

But I think this book will sell primarily because of the 45 or so pages on playing techniques: theory, practice and tricks based on simple keyboard diagrams and/or notation are all described directly and in an uncomplicated way. Importantly, this section feels like it's designed to get you to grips with keyboard techniques at the level you choose, without insisting on Chopin etudes and irrelevant homework. I'd buy it just for this bit. What a pity that something like this wasn't tacked on to the Rockschool book.

The book fades on a workmanlike chapter dealing with things to plug keyboards into, like amps, recording gadgetry, or MIDI hook-ups. There's a glossary, too.

One danger with such a book is the rapid changes taking place in and around the hardware (Kurzweil instruments, for example, are absent, while the Roland SA09 on the cover is already obsolete). But the playing section is, for the moment, unique, so you might as well take the bonus of the other sections at the same time, some of which are bound to come in handy. Generally, a sensible attempt at a subject virtually impossible to cover in one book.

Kozinn, Welding, Forte & Santoro "The Guitar"
(Columbus, 208 pages, paperback £9.95, ISBN 0-86287-053-4.)

Three solid electric guitars dominate the cover of this book and give a very unbalanced impression of its contents. What you get inside are five essays on the guitars and guitarists involved historically in classical, blues, jazz, country and rock music, written by American "experts" and journalists (but usually not both).

Thus we are dealing with a commentary here, and so the book survives or dies on the quality of the writing. It's patchy. I found it least effective in the chapter I know most about, rock, where Gene Santoro (who he?) follows the general pattern of the other chapters by mapping the development of the genre through a discussion of particular players. His treatment is largely uncritical and rather tediously factual: Jimi Hendrix was "constantly broadening his musical horizons" by jamming with other players, we're informed, while the only light shed on one of my favourite players, Richard Thompson, is that he "will always surprise and delight". These things we already know.

The other chapters are better, perhaps because they introduce unfamiliar names, and there's a useful discography at the end of each to push you further. The presentation is good and the pictures are unusual, profuse and interesting. But when the subject you know is treated so lightly you wonder how authoritative are the less well-known areas. At this price, an exploratory glance via the library is recommended.

Bert Muirhead "The Record Producers File 1962-1984"
(Blandford, 288 pages, paperback £5.95, ISBN 0-7137-1430-1.)

Lastly, a wacky offering that I find entirely addictive and, so far, totally unharmful. Muirhead runs various record collector shops in Edinburgh, and through those and the collections of several chums managed to check the production credits of over 75,000 LPs (no compilations, nothing much other than mainstream rock, virtually no "self-productions", and definitely no singles, even though Art Of Noise's "Into Battle" 12in slips into Trevor Horn's entry).

Muirhead then filed all his info on to a computer, and here's the result, a cross-referenced guide to hundreds of producers' work from Alan Abrahams (Juice Newton, Pure Prairie League) to Ritchie Zito (Tony Basil, Berlin). You can look up at the back to see under how many producers a certain group will appear listed (The As to ZZ Top), and in this sense the book resembles Blandford's other mad guide, "Rock Record".

There is a wealth of useless information here for the maniacal record fan, but as a student of record production I must confess to fascination at such scraps of information as the news that Steve Lillywhite produced an LP called "Electronic Eden" by the Brains in 1981, or that Mick Jagger produced Chris Farlowe's "The Art of Chris Farlowe" in 1966. It goes on. And on and on and on.

"I am fairly confident of having logged the bulk of the major rock albums of the last 20 years," claims Muirhead. Well, I'm sorry to say the only omission I noted during the few days that I've had the book is well obscure — David Thomas & The Pedestrians' "Sound Of The Sand", produced by Adam Kidron in 1981. Other than that...