Customer Reviews

Wired - Musicians' Home Studios: Tools & Techniques of the Musical Mavericks

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I found this book to be very helpful. I didn't know how to set up my own home studio, but I wanted to, and didn't know quite where to start. I don't really have the patience to plow through a bunch of technical manuals or reviews on equipement, I needed some ideas and inspiration for what a real working musician would do to get me unstuck. To realize that some these big name guys approached things in a really down to earth fashion and see how they set up their own places and what gear they used was pretty inspiring for me. I'm already trying things out on my own and making headway. Good stuff.

This is a very cool book -- its like getting a personal tour of the different studios, with 311, korn, snoop dogg (nice) and other people... I really like the Michael Beinhorn part, everyone talks smack about the music biz but he actually seems to know the game from both sides... That and the parts about Darin from SOAD and the guitar sound were my favorites. Also really liked the details on the equipment to get, whether its a tube mike or just foam board for your basement.

I was quite excited when I first read a review of this book seeing as it had interviews with one of my favorite bands The Crystal Method. In case you are wondering, the '...and More' artists listed on the book cover are Michael Bienhorn, BT and 311.

This book however is full of completely useless articles. The "interviews" with the artists consist of once sentence, worthless tidbits of information that you could get from any other article ever written about each band/artist. There is absolutely nothing mentioned of recording techniques as is mentioned in the tagline of this book.

What is mentioned is something to the effect of: "I think digital synths can sound as good as analog synths." Yes, quite useful information.

Overall I found literally not one single bit of information in this book that I had not already read in an article already published about one of these artists.

The only thing I can say partially positive about this book, which is also extremely disappointing, is that there are pretty thourough pictures of each band's studio. I say disappointing because these pictures are relatively small, fairly low resolution and worst of all black and white.

Overall this book is a huge disappointment and I want my $13 back! I got absolutely not one useful piece of information out of this book. I've read better articles with these bands in $4 magazines.