Recording - August 2011 - 22

Time To Get

A shelf full of books for your music-recording edification
Recording schools offer a unique experience that can’t be reproduced at home, but for those of us who don’t have the option of setting our lives aside for a while to go to such a school, there are more resources than ever available for self-study. In this special edition of our For Your Bookshelf column, we mention books on a variety of topics concerning music creation and production. Elsewhere in this month’s issue on education, we’re expanding our reach to include iOS reference materials and education tools, an instructional DVD course, electronic books available for your mobile device, and online video tutorials. And for those of you looking for even more music-related reading matter, check out Lorenz Rychner’s “Quick Takes” right after this article! There are many ways to learn. What works well for one person may be iffy for another, and it’s good to see a wider variety of presentation methods coming to the fore. With some research and experimentation, you can learn what’s best for you as a learning experience... and improve your recording chops as a result. And since for many of us the best way to get wise is with a good well-written book, let me share with you some of my happiest recent finds.—MM

Wise!
By Mike Metlay

The most ambitious part of the book is its two-chapter opening section, also entitled “What Is Music Production?”. In “Quantifying It”, the authors pull in a wide variety of historical examples and references to books and quotations by musicians, producers, engineers, and other well-respected professionals, in order to at least put borders around the topic, laying out the many things a producer might be expected to do, from the early days of recording sessions to the modern era. The other chapter in this section, “Analyzing It”, talks about critical listening, explaining everything from the operation of the human ear to the Equal Loudness Contours, and then offering a template for how to listen to a song critically and evaluate its effectiveness. Heavy stuff... but stuff we all need to know, presented in a clear and accessible format. The later sections of the book are straightforward by comparison, if equally detailed. In “Being It”, the authors lay out the critical people-skills aspects of production: networking, assembling a team, communicating effectively with artists and money men, getting the most out of your coworkers, and presenting yourself in the best manner. There’s even a chapter on the basics of treating

What Is Music Production?
By Russ Hepworth-Sawyer and Craig Golding. 284 pages, paperback, illustrated B/W. Published by Focal Press, an imprint of Elsevier, 2011. ISBN 978-0-24081126-0. $34.95; www.focalpress.com Being a producer means different things to different people, and a book that hopes to address the topic must cast a very wide net. This book, subtitled “A producer’s guide: the role, the people, the process”, does its best to take this huge and vaguely-defined topic and subdivide it into easily-understandable chunks, each section dealing with one of the areas that comes to mind when you hear the word “producer”.
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yourself and your job as a business, so as to properly manage your money and legal commitments. “Prepping It” covers what you need to have in place before you have your engineer push the Big Red Button—production deals and what they entail (quick, what’s the difference between a costs deal and an all-in?), pre-production with the artist before you get near the studio, and project management and

http://www.focalpress.com

Recording - August 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2011