Writing Protocol
Our Method page sets out what Gearwave believes: how the century is divided, how lineage is traced, how knowledge is declared, what we refuse to print. This page describes what happens between the moment an instrument is nominated and the moment its monograph goes live.
We publish this for two reasons.
- A reader is entitled to know how a claim reached the page.
- A monograph of several thousand words with hundreds of citations is not written in a burst of enthusiasm. The pipeline below exists mainly to protect the encyclopedia from its own author on a Tuesday evening when a paragraph would be so much easier to write without checking.
The pipeline at a glance
An article that fails a gate is returned to the stage that produced the failure, or demoted to a shorter format, otherwise - abandoned by our team's decision.
Stage 0. Nomination
An instrument enters the pipeline as a nomination. Nominations come from four places: the period reference tables, the collection itself, reader correspondence, and the research trail of an article already in progress, which routinely turns up a predecessor or a rival that deserves its own entry.
A nomination is a short note, rarely more than a page. It states the instrument's identity and revision, its proposed period and school, the reason it is worth an entry, whether the encyclopedia has (or can get) hands on access, and a first estimate of how much primary documentation is likely to exist. An instrument can be historically significant and still be undocumentable.
G1. Admission gate
Four questions, answered by the team over a short meeting:
Is it in scope? Gearwave covers synthesizers and signal processing instruments. The boundary is drawn at instruments whose sound is generated or substantially shaped by electronic means under performer control. Effect pedals, studio processors, mixing consoles, and tape machines are explicitely defined out of scope, with the standing exception of instruments built on tape as a generative medium, where the tape is the oscillator.
Is it already covered? A variant is not automatically becomes a new article. A revision (i.e. mk2) typically earns a section in the existing monograph. The test is whether a reader comparing the two would need materially different information.
Can significance be demonstrated? (with the kind of evidence the Method page demands) Production figures, documented use, engineering influence on later instruments, or a design idea that appears nowhere else, or significantly deviates from the main stream are all admissible.
Is documentation plausible? A first sweep for the existence of service documentation, patents, period press, and a living designer or engineer. This is a check that a dossier is possible.
Admitted nominations enter the queue with a status and a date. Rejections are kept, with the reason, because the same instrument tends to be nominated by us again, having forgotten.
Stage 1. Familiarity assessment
Before a word of the article is planned, the encyclopedia decides what it honestly knows about the instrument, and that decision determines the shape of everything downstream. This is the step the Method page describes as declaring the limits of our knowledge before a reader has to guess at them.
The assessment records logged hands on hours, the depth of that engagement, whether the instrument was owned, serviced, borrowed, or encountered, and what the encyclopedia can and cannot verify by touch. The result is a Familiarity level, and the level is not negotiable by ambition. A praised instrument played for an afternoon at a museum does not become intimately known because the writing is going well.
The badge then assigns the format automatically.
Type 1 (the full nine section monograph) is available only where hands on access supports a personal chapter and primary observation.
Type 2 (the eight section historical article) covers instruments the encyclopedia has not had under its hands, and replaces the personal chapter with documented reception and notable episodes.
G2. Format lock
The format is locked here with the badge that produced it. It can be revisited by a documented change in access (an acquisition, a loan, a service job that opens the case). The lock exists because we believe the format inflation is the most seductive failure available to a project like this one.
Stage 2. Dossier assembly
The dossier is the article's evidentiary base, assembled in full before drafting begins. The order of assembly follows the source hierarchy set out in the Method page, and the order is enforced by sequence: primary material is gathered first, secondary material second, personal intake last.
The primary sweep looks for original manufacturer documentation (manuals, service documentation, schematics, parts lists, dealer material, price lists) together with patents, period advertising and press, reviews, and designer interviews from the period of release. For Soviet and Eastern European instruments this extends to digitised engineering journals, factory documentation, ministry-level production records, all of which take longer to reach and repay the effort.
The secondary sweep collects historical features, museum documentation, the standing books, and the academic literature, principally for context and cross checking.
Two further items belong to the dossier proper. Provenance for Type 1 instruments, the serial number, revision, date of manufacture, known service history, and any modifications away from factory condition, because an observation about a modified instrument is an observation about a modified instrument. And the gap list: questions the sweep raised and could not answer. Several of its entries usually survive into the finished article as explicit gap markers, which is where they do the most good.
G3. Sufficiency gate
A minimum count of independent primary sources is required before drafting may begin, and the minimum is higher for Type 1 than for Type 2. Any date or attribution destined for the article's factual spine needs independent corroboration. A single source establishes a claim only when the article says so at the point of claim.
Failing this gate has three possible outcomes. The article can be demoted to a shorter format matching the evidence actually in hand. It can be suspended, returned to the queue with a note naming the missing material, to be revisited if it surfaces. Or it can be abandoned, with a published note on the era page recording that the instrument is significant, that its documentation does not currently support an entry, and what would change that. The third outcome is an open request for help.
Stage 3. The claim ledger
Every factual assertion that will appear in the article is entered in a ledger before it is written into prose. A ledger row carries the claim in its narrowest form, the source or sources behind it, the source tier, and a status.
The ledger sounds bureaucratic and is. It also separates the act of establishing a fact from the act of writing a sentence. Facts checked while writing get checked at the speed of writing, which is to say against whatever is nearest. The rejected row exists because a startling number of confidently repeated synthesizer facts resolve, when followed, to a single unsourced encyclopedia edit made years ago by someone who no longer remembers making it.
Alongside the ledger runs the contradiction log, which records every disagreement found between sources and how the article handles it. Nothing in the log may be resolved by preference. Where two credible accounts differ on a date, a unit count, or who designed what, the article says so and names both. This is frequently the most interesting paragraph on the page.
G4. Verification gate
Drafting may not begin while any ledger row destined for the article's factual spine sits without a status.
Stage 4. Bench work
This stage applies to Type 1 articles only. An instrument on the bench is asked a fixed set of questions, in the same way, every time, so that observations across the collection can be compared.
Condition and calibration come first: the instrument is documented as found, then brought to a known state, with any adjustment recorded. An observation about tuning stability on an uncalibrated machine is often a fact about that machine's last technician.
The measurement pass follows a standing sheet. Here are several done:
- Oscillator drift measured cold, then at intervals across a warm up period.
- Tuning stability across the keyboard range.
- Filter response through its sweep at several resonance settings, including the behaviour at self-oscillation.
- Envelope timings at their extremes.
- Noise floor and output level.
- Latency and voice allocation behaviour where the architecture makes them meaningful.
The sheet is the same sheet for every instrument, which is what makes a cross-collection comparison possible and keeps the writing from grading on a curve.
The microtonal pass (a Gearwave standing interest) tests what tuning systems the instrument will actually accept and how gracefully. Pitch resolution, tuning table support if any, the practical limits of retuning by ear, and what the architecture does when asked for intervals it was never designed to produce. A good deal of the encyclopedia's original material lives here, because almost nobody else asks a 1978 polysynth this question.
The playing hours are logged, plainly, as hours. A number tells total experienced time of all Gearwave members combined for the particular instrument.
The plate pass produces photography to a fixed list: full instrument, control surface in detail, rear panel, macro plates of anything the technical sections will discuss.
G5. Primary observation gate
A minimum of logged hours, spread across a minimum number of separate sessions, is required before the personal chapter may be written. Below the threshold, the article proceeds, but as Type 2, without a personal chapter, with the badge adjusted accordingly. The gate is deliberately mechanical, because the honest answer to have we spent enough time with this? is one nobody gives accurately about an instrument they are enjoying.
Stage 5. Structural outline
The article is planned section by section against the format locked at G2, with a word budget per section and every ledger row assigned to the section that will carry it. Assignment before drafting prevents the two commonest structural faults in long technical writing: the same fact argued three times in three places, and the interesting fact that never lands anywhere because no section quite owned it.
The outline also names the article's spine (the specific argument the monograph makes about the instrument) - an answer to why is this instrument the way it is. An entry without a spine becomes a specification list with paragraphs attached, which is a thing the internet already has.
G6. Outline review
- Does the structure follow the instrument, or has the template been filled out? Every format has sections that some instruments do not need; a section with nothing to say should be short, and occasionally absent, and the outline is where that is decided rather than discovered at four thousand words.
- Is the spine stated in one sentence? If it takes three, it is not yet one.
Stage 6. Drafting
Sections are drafted in a fixed order. Technical and historical sections come first, while the dossier is fresh and the ledger is open. Context and reception follow. The personal chapter is written last, deliberately, when the instrument has already been described accurately by other means and the chapter has to earn its place beside them.
Two rules govern the prose itself, both inherited from the Method page. Citations are placed at the point of claim as the sentence is written, never swept in afterwards; a citation pass over uncited prose is a reconstruction, and reconstructions are where errors enter. And promotional vocabulary is not permitted to reach the draft.
Stage 7. Review passes
The draft is reviewed in separate passes, each looking for one class of problem.
Fact pass. Every claim in the prose is checked back against its ledger row. Claims that appeared during drafting without a row are either sourced now or cut now.
Citation pass. Every citation is followed to confirm it says what the sentence says it says, that the anchor text names the source.
Vocabulary pass. A search for the banned register: iconic, legendary, revolutionary, game changing, and the family of words that claim significance instead of showing it.
Attribution pass. Hedges are hunted and resolved. Many musicians used it becomes three named musicians with sources, or it goes. Often considered acquires a by whom, a where, and a when.
First-person pass. The removal test from the Method page, applied paragraph by paragraph to the personal chapter: if a paragraph cannot survive the deletion of every first-person reference and mention of rarity, acquisition or personal feelings, it was not about the instrument, and it goes.
Structure pass. Read for the reader rather than the writer. Does each section deliver what its heading promises, do the technical sections remain legible to someone who is not an engineer.
Gap pass. The gap list is revisited and its surviving entries are written into the article as explicit open questions.
G7. Cooling gate
The finished draft is set aside for a fixed period before its final read. The cooling read is done against the format spec and the ledger, because a writer rereading fresh work reads what they meant. After a couple of weeks they read what they wrote, which is the version the audience gets.
Drafts that do not survive their own cooling read go back to Stage 5.
Stage 8. Publication
A release checklist, satisfied in full.
Stage 9. Maintenance
Three things reopen a published article. A correction - a reader (and it is often a reader who owned the instrument when it was new) supplies better evidence than we held. A change in familiarity - an instrument acquired, serviced, extensively played since publication can raise the badge and, with it, the format (a Type 2 entry can become a Type 1 entry years later, and the revision log will show it happening). New primary material, like a schematic surfaces, an archive digitises, a designer gives a late interview, a factory record turns up in a ministry file.
Articles are also re read on a standing cycle regardless of whether anything has prompted it, principally to catch link rot, and the occasional sentence that was fashionable in its year.
Where the pipeline fails
Instruments get stuck at G3 and stay stuck, sometimes for years, because the documentation does not exist and no amount of persistence conjures it. Drafts get demoted at G5 when the honest hour count comes in below the threshold. Articles get abandoned after substantial work when the evidence turns out to contradict the spine the outline was built on. Occasionally a published entry turns out to be wrong in a way that a revision cannot repair, in which case it is rewritten from Stage 2 and the revision log says exactly that.
The queue is therefore always longer than the encyclopedia, and always will be. This is the normal condition of reference work.
Corrections and contributions
If you owned one of these instruments, serviced one, designed one, or hold documentation we have not found, we would like to hear from you, particularly if you can close an open question we have printed. Corrections are welcome, credited unless you would rather not be, and entered in the revision log with a date. Contributions of primary material are the single most useful thing a reader can send.