Music/sound making guides

Hi!

What guides do you recommend for learning to make music, and learning to make patches? So far I've been looking at the following:

Music/Lyrics

• Alan Belkin: A Practical Guide to Musical Composition
  
• Simon Bennett: The Ravenspiral Guide
  
• Jason Blume: 6 Steps to Songwriting Success
  
• Sheila Davis: The Craft of Lyric Writing
  
• Eric Turkel: Arranging Techniques for Synthesists
  

Patches

• David Crombie: The New Complete Synthesizer
  
• Gordon Reid: Synth Secrets
  
• Fred Welsh: Welsh's Synthesizer Cookbook
  

Production

• Bobby Owsinski: The Mixing Engineer's Handbook
  

Are there any other good guides I'm missing out on?

Thanks!

ball-sucking

• tht! tne - suck my balls
  

watch the extras on the THX 1138 DVD

there's a bit where Walter Murch explains how to expand your reverb. when he explained it, i was like

  On 6/15/2010 at 10:32 PM, oscillik said:

watch the extras on the THX 1138 DVD

Hey, don't knock it, that film was good enough for Richie Hawtin and Trent Reznor to sample...

  On 6/15/2010 at 11:20 PM, ZoeB said:

  On 6/15/2010 at 10:32 PM, oscillik said:

watch the extras on the THX 1138 DVD

 

Hey, don't knock it, that film was good enough for Richie Hawtin and Trent Reznor to sample...

i'm not knocking it, i'm being serious. he explains about using the room reverb, and sampling it so you can get more out of it. you'd have to watch it, he explains it better.

  On 6/15/2010 at 10:32 PM, oscillik said:

watch the extras on the THX 1138 DVD

there's a bit where Walter Murch explains how to expand your reverb. when he explained it, i was like

Sorry! After the previous comment I'd kinda assumed you were being sarcastic... I've found it now, 23:02 into the making of. Thanks! :Hides:

  On 6/15/2010 at 10:32 PM, oscillik said:

He explains about using the room reverb, and sampling it so you can get more out of it.

Ooh, I can't believe I never noticed this before... you're right! Special features > master sessions > index > creating echo effects. It sounds like he used the BBC Radiophonic Workshop method: play the tape, record the echo onto another tape. That's really neat about speeding it up, getting a real echo, and slowing it back down again... That makes the reverb sound bigger the same way that slowing down sounds in general makes them sound bigger. (Scraping knives together, pitched down a few octaves, sounds a lot like swords, for instance.)

Thanks for the tip!

  On 6/15/2010 at 11:45 PM, ZoeB said:

  On 6/15/2010 at 10:32 PM, oscillik said:

He explains about using the room reverb, and sampling it so you can get more out of it.

 

Ooh, I can't believe I never noticed this before... you're right! Special features > master sessions > index > creating echo effects. It sounds like he used the BBC Radiophonic Workshop method: play the tape, record the echo onto another tape. That's really neat about speeding it up, getting a real echo, and slowing it back down again... That makes the reverb sound bigger the same way that slowing down sounds in general makes them sound bigger. (Scraping knives together, pitched down a few octaves, sounds a lot like swords, for instance.)

 

Thanks for the tip!

yeah, it's one of those tips that still makes me

I have been looking and looking for the books by which I learned to read music (mainly because I've been trying to remember which colour goes with which note) but I've had no luck. There's lots of "playing with colour" type things on the internet, but they are all aimed at little, little (i.e. pre-reading age) kids. But I suppose that's the age I learned with this method, so it's not going to be helpful to you as an adult.

Most of the knowledge I've picked up, though, hasn't been learned from books. Couple of places that influenced my musical education...

- the Church. Yeah, yeah, laugh if you like, my mother is a priest, I spent a lot of time hanging around churches as a kid, while my mum was working. But a huge amount of my musical education came from various choirmasters (it's certainly where I learned to sing, and especially where I learned about vocal harmonies) / organists who gave me piano lessons / taught me bits of music theory / just sat around rehearsing Bach cantatas to the audience of an entranced 9 year old.

- my Dad is a soundman. He's into nothing like the music I am but he worked in several well known folk clubs in upstate NY when I was a teenager, and as he was sat at the mixing desk, he'd explain what he was doing to me. Yeah, a mandocello is nothing like a Moog, but you can get an idea of the basics of channels and faders and sends and EQ and amps from any mixing console.

- I went to art school, but the same campus also had the music facilities, and you could take credits outside your area. I did a course in electronic synthesis in about 1989 and the prof had written his own course material. I wish to god I'd kept it. He was mad as a box of frogs and seriously into generative music but he carefully explained to all us gaping n00bs what ADSR and LFO meant. Also did a semester's course in being a sound engineer for the studio (that was the first time I'd ever seen an 808 in the flesh, and they just used it as click track for some god awful RAWK band) but I quit cause I couldn't stand the bands we had to record, and went home and tried to practice everything in the textbook with my 4-track. Not quite the same.

- reading magazines. Everybody likes to hate on Sound On Sound and Future Music and the like, but if you spend any time at all hanging around recording studios, it's all they ever have to read, and 9/10 of going in the studio is hanging around waiting to get called back for overdubs. No point in getting a subscription, but if they're around, they're interesting enough to read, and you can get good pointers.

But the single best way to learn any of these things is to get one, read the manual (everything is archived on the interweb these days) and then play around with it. If it has a knob, twiddle it. Hear what it does. Although it's good to know the science and circuitry behind them, the single best way to learn how to do anything is to push the button and see if it goes "wub" or "wow" or what. Some of the most useful learning I ever did was aged about 16, 17, sitting around bored one summer with my best mate and a dimebag, trying to make her Juno-6 make fart noises and quack like a duck. For reals.

Anyway, I know that's not what you asked, but I do think it's important to stress that the vast bulk of any producer's knowledge will/should come from experience and just mucking about with stuff.

I'd be really interested to hear from other musicians about the useful places they learned stuff that wasn't in books...

the problem with a lot of production guides and courses is that the technology and techniques can become dated very quickly however the advantage of this is that you can now have a fully featured virtual studio setup all on your laptop for very little money which was much harder over a decade ago when you had to spend a lot of cash on shitty 2nd hardware to get going

Reason and Ableton Live are the best to start with and you can download complete demo songs so you can see how the big guys put things together practically which is the best way imho although its best to read up on some basic ground knowledge of how things work and plug into eachother

saying that a total software enviroment isn't the most fun to get creative with so the old hands on hardware route can be more intuative and inspiring its just a case of finding a happy medium between the two

bump :-/

This is a very comprehensive guide that covers everything from synth programming, effects, sequencing, mixing and mastering.

You can skip the section on particular sub-genres, though you would learn a lot from those too. I found them at least somewhat useful.

At amazon you can check out much of the text of this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0240521072/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?ie=UTF8&cloe_id=c1e71230-c243-4470-ba6c-e019673274d8&attrMsgId=LPWidget-A1&pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0240519159&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=02GDAMDXM7WK53WTRR45

Oh, I can't believe I forgot this... Wendy Carlos's CD Secrets of Synthesis, although she doesn't really teach you how to make patches as much as she shows how much painstaking effort she puts into her own. I'm in awe of anyone who has such a driven work ethic.