Originally, the contents of this website was going to be a book. This
book would not only earn me fame and fortune, but my career as a sound engineer would take off in a way that would lead to
international professional recognition (to go along with the fame and fortune!)
Then the lady from the publisher mentioned what kind of money was involved
and they haven't heard from me since!
Work it out for yourself! If I'm lucky, they'll sell a thousand copies, after all, it's not exactly
erotic fiction! That's if I'm lucky! Given the amount of work involved in battering the sort of vague ramblings
that you will find here, into the strict structure of a book, it was just not worth the effort.
So there I was with a half finished book, thinking "Now what?"
Well, to cut a long story short, I have been able to sell sections of all
this as a series of magazine articles and others have been dragged up from past articles that I have written over the years.
Altogether it is a right hodge-podge of bits and pieces all cobbled together.
The advantage of a website over a book, however, is that I can alter
and update things when the mood takes me. I can leave things half-finished and say "What the heck, I'll do that bit
later!"
With a book, you are stuck. What's done is done. You have to
wait for the publisher to be fooled into believing that he or she can flog-off another 1,000 copies, so it's worthwhile getting
you to re-write certain parts. Until then, everybody and their mothers-in-law write emails to you, pointing out every
mistake and every out-of-date reference, over and over and over again.
Also you can't add podcasts and other exciting (yea, sure!) interactive
things (like the quiz in the links-and-things pages) to a book.
This site is supposed to compliment other sites and books on the subject
of recording music and other noises, so you will not find anything about electronics or electrical engineering. Similarly,
you will find nothing here about musical theory.
This website is about the practicalities of building and running a recording
studio. You know, all those things that books don't tell you.
All sorts of very clever people with a string of credits and academic titles
will tell you where to put a microphone (where the monkey puts the nuts, of course!) but they fail to tell you where to buy
that microphone cheaply, or how to pick a model that will hold its value.
More importantly, they don't tell you how to get the job of putting anything
anywhere in the first place. In other words, how to put a career together, how to get work in the first place.
In other words, this is all written by a studio owner about the business
of owning and working in a studio. That studio may be your home studio built into the spare bedroom, or it may be the
big, city centre affair that all the kids at colleges dream of working in.
If you are looking for books on theory, I suggest 'Sound
and Recording' by Rumsey and McCormick which is a fundamental grounding in all things audio-technical.
'Acoustics and Psychoacostics' by Howard and Angus is another must-read. If you are mad enough to
want to build your own studio, try 'Recording Studio Design' by Philip Newell, all 600+ pages of it!
It is a great book, full of all the information you need to build a professional studio. If that is too much and all
you want to do is convert the basement, then try 'Home Recording Studio - Build it like the pros' by Rod Gervais,
a great hands-on practical guide to building a budget home studio.
I am sure that there are many other very good books on how to record music
and other noises without getting a nose bleed, but they are the ones that I recommend.
There are of course a shed-load of silly how-to books that seem to be written
by the sort of people who used to write essays at school that began with the words "There are many different types of . .
." but we shall gloss over those - and hope that they one day go away!
Anyway, here's the website. Have a good dig around, enjoy yourself.
If you feel that there is anything that needs to be change or added, let me know!
Andrew Graeme
