Home Recording for Musicians is the definitive book on understanding and using, today's recording technology. Whether amateur or professional, you will find that this book is packed with useful tips on every aspect of recording, from the initial purchase of your gear to mixing and assembling a master tape or CD.

Build a home studio to fit any budget Explore equipment and techniques for making top-notch recordings at home You've picked a perfect time to start recording! From PC-based to studio-in-a-box, today's equipment lets you put together a professional quality CD right at home, if you know how to use it. This guide covers everything from microphone placement to multitracking and mastering, helping you choose the right tools and use them like a pro. Discover how to: Create a studio around your budget Direct signal flow to maximize your sound Apply the best microphone techniques Use compressors and limiters properly Build a space for optimum mixing

General Reference

This highly successful book from 2004 has now been brought fully up to date. If you are interested in making music on your computer, then this is for you. You can start from scratch with the basics on software, recording methods and mixing techniques, and then move on to the exhaustive reference section covering resources and technical information, with in-depth studies of software, effects and equipment. There is also advice on how to distribute and promote recordings, releasing music, organizing gigs and legal and copyright issues.

A comprehensive, accessible guide for musicians who are trying to keep up with technology, this title shouls serve as an inspiration to anyone thinking of the best way to make music more easily. It brings together all the techniques, simplifies the jargon and shows you how it's done.

(Technical Reference). Gone are the days when home recording was limited to four tracks of tape hiss on a cassette porta-studio. Now, limitless digital multitrack recording and a vast array of outboard effects and processors are available to anyone with a computer. Add a few other essentials such as a microphone, some headphones & monitors, and you've got a home studio capable of making professional recordings worthy of airplay and release. What you might not have is the know-how to harness all that vast potential ... which is where the Home Recording Handbook comes in. Author Dave Hunter shows you how to make pro-sounding recordings without pro budgets. Packed with tips and techniques born out of years of recording experience, supported by specially recorded audio tracks, this is an essential volume for the working musician.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse." Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.