Customer Reviews

Real World Digital Audio

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This is a book for musicians who need to understand the science of sound as well as the principles of digital music production including equipment, computers, and software. There is even an entire chapter dedicated to MIDI. If you are a musician who is interested in getting involved in computer music, this is a great place to start learning as well as getting your hands dirty with the actual business of creating digital music.

Chapter 1. Understanding Digital Sound - Covers the basic physical concepts of analog sound - the sine wave, pitch, amplitude, and perception. Next the book discusses how these concepts translate into digital form.

Chapter 2. Choosing Your Tools - Surveys the available hardware and software you'll need to produce digital audio. Included are photos of typical devices, their uses, their price ranges, and examples of some name-brand products. This section even tells you how to select a computer that is best for your needs.

Chapter 3. Setting Up Your Equipment - Discusses all aspects of connecting the physical hardware you selected in chapter two. This includes a discussion of the desirable acoustic properties of the room you'll be using for your studio.

Chapter 4. Preparing Your Computer for Audio - Discusses setting up your computer to optimize your audio productivity. This chapter gives detailed instructions on the installation and configuration of drivers and plug-ins, copy protection schemes, disk storage space, operating system optimization, and other tips on making a computer most efficient for the production of digital music.

Chapter 5. Quick Songs with Patterns and Loops - Shows you how to quickly and easily turn your ideas into music using Kinetic and GarageBand's pre-built musical components.

Chapter 6. Recording Instruments and Sound - This chapter is all about the different types of microphones and how they work. Discusses microphone characteristics and what types of sound they are best at capturing, how they affect sound coming from various directions, strategies for placing your microphones at various distances and in various arrangements. Also shown are microphone strategies for different instruments and the use of Audacity and Ableton Live, which is recording software included on the DVD.

Chapter 7. Processing and Effects - Without getting over-technical(i.e. mathematical), this section discusses the various effects you'll need to know about to complete most digital audio projects. The chapter begins discussing what signal processors are and then goes on to explain equalization, dynamics processors, time-related effects such as delay and reverb, and specialized processors such as distortion and modulation.

Chapter 8. MIDI: Notes, Rhythms, and Physical Control - Discusses how MIDI enables you to express digital music in a form that seems natural to musicians. The chapter discusses when to use MIDI, how to connect MIDI devices, MIDI's data structure and messaging system, and how to put everything together so that you can use MIDI to create a song.

Chapter 9. Synthesis and Software Instruments - This chapter concerns turning your computer and its software into various musical instruments. You learn how to work with prefabricated sounds, analog waveshapes and their sounds, and how to use envelopes, modulation, and different effects to produce more interesting sounds.

Chapter 10. Put It Together: Arrange, Mix, and Master - This chapter takes the material from the previous nine and shows you how to arrange and assemble a complete composition, including mixing, so that you have something professional sounding that is ready for distribution, which is also discussed.

Chapter 11. Producing Printed Scores - Goes into detail about producing a score. Shows how to choose the right notation software, using quick-start features and templates, how to input your notes to your score either via keyboard, MIDI, scanning, or pure audio, assembling and replaying your score, and finally sharing your results with others. Sibelius and Finale are among the software packages featured.

Chapter 12. Music and Sound for Video - Builds on what you have learned about digital audio and shows you how to synchronize that audio to video. You'll learn about adjusting cues to fit the video, measuring time in frames, recording sound for easy synchronization, and recording dialog.

Chapter 13. Playing Live - This chapter includes discussions on the live arranging of music and DJing your live arrangements. The actual software used is discussed in some detail.

The DVD contains over two gigabytes of sound content, instruments, and software tools. Included are Ableton Live, Audacity, a 30-day demo version of Cakewalk Kinetic, a full version of IK Multimedia AmpliTube UNO, MIDI management utilities, and a collection of free plug-in and standalone instruments and effects for Mac and Windows.

This book is a great compendium of explanation, tutorial, product reviews, and software. In fact, for once the included disc has programs that are actually useful - not just time-limited demos of whatever software was new at the time of publishing. The author also utilizes the included software (PC and Mac alike) in his explanations and tutorials, so you're buying a multimedia learning package. Newbies and old pros will be sure to get their money's worth!

Many of us out here have been working with and around audio for many years. As well, most of us have resisted the "I/O" demon, ha! After updating my equipment, a little at a time, I found myself in the digital domain; like it or not.

Upon review of this book "Real World Digital Audio" in EQ Magazine, I immediately purchased it, and got what I asked for; more work. Good work however, in that the author placed me in the driver's seat, gave me an easy to understand road map (I brought the cheetos)and it's been just great! Something I can use to honestly understand where I'm at with newer and evolving technologies, and put them to work in a positive and productive manner.

Bravo!

I want to say that I couldn't have gotten a better text book for my community college audio production class. Great in-depth book."

This is a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute study of the digital music world that is unparralelled in accessibility. Read this book cover to cover and then enjoy the freedom to go any direction you like in the field, knowing that you have the fundamentals.

Peter Kirn has managed to explain the concepts in a way that is clear and concise without ever being misleading or confusing. Read this and you can know that the next audio text you pick up you won't get stuck on concepts that are taken for granted by so many authors. College level "Introduction to Music Technology" classes (that so often fall short of expectation) would do themselves a favor to make this required reading.

I couldn't have purchased this book at a better time. It has answered questions I've been wondering about, made connections for many topics I vaguely understood, and shed light on concepts I had never considered. It is well written, has a text book feel (which works very well in this case), and begs to be reread. I find myself jumping between chapters to study specific topics (midi, synthesis, mixing, arrangement, etc), but it is laid out in way that reading from cover to cover in a linear fashion would be a wonderful introduction to digital audio if you're brand new to it. If you're trying to figure out the sometimes seemingly-overwhelming world of music production, this is a perfect place to start.

The included DVD offers some nice free software programs that are referenced constantly throughout every chapter, so the book provides a hands-on approach to help you understand what could be seen as somewhat abstract concepts to a beginner. But the examples and opportunities to practice what is discussed makes the concepts clear and more concrete.

Brilliant! Buy it!

Also check out the author's excellent blog: http://www.createdigitalmusic.com

I bought this book for school, no other reason. It has a lot of good information for people looking to get into the music business.

A perfect book to get you started in your digital audio endeavors.Filled with practical information about almost anything involved ,honest and well grounded.Chapters on acoustics, toolkit,setup, installation-configuration,simple songmaking guide, recording, effects,midi control,mixing-mastering, audio for videos and a DVD full of tools and extras, make it clear that it is a book to be used.

Having read a handful of similar books I can't be certain but for me this is almost perfect

This book was disappointing. If you're looking for anything in depth look elsewhere. Plug ins and their use were given short shrift. A paragraph on the use of compressors, for instance. Not much more than you'd find in your user's manual. Suggestions for general use ok, but definitely not hands on. This book is meant for absolute beginners with emphasis on selling products that the author wants to promote or is being paid to promote.