The Bandura Musician Handbook: A Guide to Learning About the Bandura

You can find little bits of information scattered around the internet about the bandura, the national instrument of Ukraine: how to hold it, how it's tuned, etc. But English-speaking folks trying to play the instrument will find a total lack of information on how to actually play it. What do the left hand and right hand techniques look like, how is music for the instrument notated, what considerations are there for muting, ornamentation, moments where the left hand drops to the lower part of the instrument, etc, all remain elusive if you're not familiar with Cyrillic-language resources.I had hoped this book would be at least a basic overview of the approach to the instrument, along the lines of something like the Noad "Solo Guitar Playing 1" book for guitar, or at least something like the Alfred. But oddly this book contains a lot of information about everything EXCEPT how one would actually go about playing the instrument. It's frankly kind of bizarre. You'll find lots of information about the construction of banduras, the equations luthiers use to estimate string tension, how one might go about choosing a bandura, some stretching exercises you can do before playing, some tips on how to promote yourself and get gigs: all kind of interesting, but not particularly germane to the topic at hand, which I would have assumed would be how to play the instrument. I would imagine that most folks in the market for a "musician handbook" about a given instrument already own the instrument, rendering most of this information little more than trivia.Perhaps most perplexing, is the section that discusses aspects of music theory: fundamentals of reading, chords and basic chord inversions, but again no musical examples at all of putting this information into practical use in music. There are generally two kinds of people looking at a "handbook" for an instrument: beginners or musicians who are taking up an additional instrument. The former would need to have these theory fundamentals put into a musical context through examples, or the information is just a lot of noise; the latter likely know these things and are just looking for some basic examples of how to play the instrument, and some simple musical examples that start to show what's idiomatic to play on it.I am a professional music librarian, and have examined literally thousands of music instructional books, and this is the weirdest one I have ever seen, sadly. It's basically just a bunch of minutiae that won't help to get you playing the bandura. I guess it's back to watching YouTube videos to try to cop some technique and repertoire for me.