Download Recording Tips for Engineers, For Cleaner, Brighter Tracks, 2nd Edition ePub

Loved it...from cover to cover. I learned several tricks that I will be applying from now on. Plus....it's interesting and entertaining and humorous.

This book has some good tips but assumes you're working in a pro studio. Some of the material seems a bit dated. They should offer an alternative book for home studios.

Recording Tips for Engineers (For Cleaner Brighter Tracks) (3rd ed.) covers many aspects of the business of being an audio engineer (which involves running an audio studio and recording other performers). It covers many aspects of the business, from psychological (e.g., how to properly treat clients, get the best performances out of singers and protect your hearing) to organizational (what should be documented and why) to technical issues, such as different types of microphones and their characteristics and proper placement (for drums, piano, voice, guitar, etc). This book does not spend any time on what specific kind of audio equipment (hardware or software) an engineer should purchase and that makes sense, because products are forever changing. However, the author does talk about the general types of equipment a typical audio engineer will have access to (such as de-essers, multi-band compressors and gates) and he explains, in appropriate detail, many standard technical terms, such as flanging versus reverb, phase versus panning, and how compression and equalization affect sound waves. In terms of writing, the book consists of a series of short paragraphs -- each a specific "tip" (for example, if you want to deaden a kick drum then you can place a folded packing blanket or sand bag inside it).

In addition to professional audio engineers who want to improve their craft, many Do-It-Yourself artists now produce their own CDs and my husband is one of these, so he was interested in this book as a way of improving his skills in areas such as microphone placement and proper use of equalization and compression. In these areas, he found the book very helpful.

However, there was one area in which this book was very disappointing to him and it is really the fault of how the book is being marketed. The book cover includes a large circle with the words "Mastering Music" on it. This leads (mistakenly) to the impression that the reader will learn something about the process of producing the final master. Music mastering is the critical step (after all tracks for a each song or instrumental piece have been mixed down to a single, stereo track) of boosting all of the sound levels of each piece to match the market, of making them comparable to each other in volume, and most importantly, of giving each song that professional, final "commercial" sound. Unfortunately, there are only 6 brief paragraphs on the mastering process and those paragraphs are mostly about how important it is to send the mixed-down versions to a good mastering engineer. So it is unfortunate that "Mastering Music" is placed so prominently on the cover page. With that caveat, my husband recommends this book to anyone who does audio recording and wants to improve their quality.

I'm no expert in recording, but I've done it a long time and I've come a long way from where I started. Back in the 80's before there was cheap digital equipment, lots of competition to make it affordable, Recording Magazine (formerly Home and Studio Recording), and too many books on the subject to read them all, the best way to learn about recording was to watch others at work and ask questions. With a little luck, you could get information that matched your level of knowledge and experience. Then, as you started out on your own, you quickly gained a lot of knowledge from your own experience. This book is a distillation of that same kind of practical experience, gained from the school of hard knocks. The good thing about this book is that it organizes the same kind of hard-to-find, but highly relevant tips on professionalism, client satisfaction, and quality end product into manageable categories instead of throwing them at the reader in random order. The only drawback is that when the tips are hard-won, by hard knocks or time spent grilling others, they seem to stick better, especially in old brains like mine.

You should probably not be recording others, even for free, until you know your equipment well enough to make it through a simple session without a lot of manual-grabbing or trial-and-error in front of the musician. This book would make a great reference to consult before the session begins, to remind you of precautions to take and to arm you with solutions to issues that you will inevitably encounter. Then, keep it handy as a refresher for future sessions. Get this book and you'll learn a lot of good things about recording that tend to fall between the cracks in other books and articles.