(Berklee Guide). Writers of commercial music are more in demand than ever before. The rules have changed in the past decade, and the contemporary writer needs a multifaceted skillset in order to succeed in business. This book will help you master the three roles of the new job: writer, producer, and engineer. You will learn to set up a profitable business model for creating commercial music, providing your clients with music that fits their needs and budget, at today's quality standards. Whether your interest is in producing music for jingles, film scores, videogames, corporate presentations, or other commercial areas, this book will reveal how to set up shop, find work, and create music at today's demanding professional standards.

Working as a recording engineer presents challenges from every direction of your project. From using microphones to deciding on EQ settings, choosing outboard gear to understanding how, when and why to process your signal, the seemingly never-ending choices can be very confusing. Professional Audio's bestselling author Bobby Owsinski (The Mixing Engineer's Handbook, The Mastering Engineer's Handbook) takes you into the tracking process for all manner of instruments and vocals-- providing you with the knowledge and skill to make sense of the many choices you have in any given project. From acoustic to electronic instruments, mic placement to EQ settings, everything you need to know to capture professionally recorded audio tracks is in this guide.

Chairman at the Board is an intimate, funny, and absorbing look at the music business by an insider who has recorded a host of the greatest musical artists from the 1970s to today. Bill Schnee takes the reader inside the studio--behind the curtain--and through the decades with a cavalcade of famous artists as he helped them realize their vision. After his high school band was dropped by Decca Records, Schnee began his quest to learn everything he could about making records. Mentored by technical guru Toby Foster, mastering guru Doug Sax, and recording legend Richie Podolor at his American Recording Studio, he immediately began recording the top acts of the day as a freelance engineer/producer in Hollywood. Clive Davis soon hired him to work for CBS where he partnered with famed music producer Richard Perry. Schnee went on to record and/or mix many of Perry's biggest albums of the '70s and '80s, including those by Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Ringo Starr, Art Garfunkel, and The Pointer Sisters. With his deft personal touch with musicians, he continued to engineer and/or produce the likes of Marvin Gaye, Thelma Houston (the Grammy-nominated, direct-to-disc album I've Got the Music in Me), Pablo Cruise, Neil Diamond, Boz Scaggs, the Jacksons, Huey Lewis and the News, Dire Straits, and Whitney Houston. With over 125 gold and platinum records, and two Grammys for Steely Dan's Aja and Gaucho, Schnee has been called a living legend--recognized and respected in the industry as the consummate music man with an incomparable career that he lovingly shares with his readers in humorous detail.

(Berklee Guide). Understanding Audio explores the fundamentals of audio and acoustics that impact every stage of the music recording process. Whether you are a musician setting up your first Pro Tools project studio, or you are a seasoned recording engineer or producer eager to find a reference that fills in the gaps in your understanding of audio, this book is for you. Understanding Audio will enable you to develop a thorough understanding of the underlying principles of sound, and take some of the mystery and guesswork out of how equipment setup affects the quality of your recordings. Projects at the end of each chapter will assist you in applying these principles to your own recording environment. Learn about: * Basic and advanced audio theory * Cables and studio wiring * Recording studio and console signal flow * Digital and analog audio * Studio and listening room acoustics * Psychoacoustics * "In the Studio" insights, relating audio principles to real recording situations

The evolution of the record producer from organizer to auteur, from Phil Spector and George Martin to the rise of hip-hop and remixing. In the 1960s, rock and pop music recording questioned the convention that recordings should recreate the illusion of a concert hall setting. The Wall of Sound that Phil Spector built behind various artists and the intricate eclecticism of George Martin's recordings of the Beatles did not resemble live performances—in the Albert Hall or elsewhere—but instead created a new sonic world. The role of the record producer, writes Virgil Moorefield in The Producer as Composer, was evolving from that of organizer to auteur; band members became actors in what Frank Zappa called a "movie for your ears." In rock and pop, in the absence of a notated score, the recorded version of a song—created by the producer in collaboration with the musicians—became the definitive version. Moorefield, a musician and producer himself, traces this evolution with detailed discussions of works by producers and producer-musicians including Spector and Martin, Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, Trent Reznor, Quincy Jones, and the Chemical Brothers. Underlying the transformation, Moorefield writes, is technological development: new techniques—tape editing, overdubbing, compression—and, in the last ten years, inexpensive digital recording equipment that allows artists to become their own producers. What began when rock and pop producers reinvented themselves in the 1960s has continued; Moorefield describes the importance of disco, hip-hop, remixing, and other forms of electronic music production in shaping the sound of contemporary pop. He discusses the making of Pet Sounds and the production of tracks by Public Enemy with equal discernment, drawing on his own years of studio experience. Much has been written about rock and pop in the last 35 years, but hardly any of it deals with what is actually heard in a given pop song. The Producer as Composer tries to unravel the mystery of good pop: why does it sound the way it does?