Dance Music Manual: Tools, Toys, and Techniques Author: Rick Snoman | Language: English | ISBN:
0415825644 | Format: PDF
Dance Music Manual: Tools, Toys, and Techniques Description
What are the differences between trance and chill out? How can you create compelling, professional-sounding original or remixed dance tracks? With Dance Music Manual, you’ll get coverage of every aspect of dance music production—from designing sounds to compression, from effects to mixing and mastering—and go even further, with advice on publishing and promoting your tracks. No matter your level of experience, this book is packed with techniques and practical tips to help you achieve professional results, whether you’re an aspiring dance music producer, DJ, remixer, recording engineer, musician, or composer.
The companion website provides examples of synthesis programming, compression, effects, MIDI files and examples of the tracks discussed within this edition.
The third edition includes up-to-date dance music coverage, including new chapters on arranging dance music, layering kicks, more on music theory, fundamentals of rhythm, building professional drum loops, gain structure, producing dubstep, and advice on the very latest production techniques.
- Paperback: 536 pages
- Publisher: Focal Press; 3 edition (October 1, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0415825644
- ISBN-13: 978-0415825641
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.6 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
I started to read this book after an extensive year of getting my hands dirty on producing dance music. I can also say that I own the 2nd edition of this book and will compare the two side by side.
Firstly, the second edition seems outdated from when I first picked it up. As the first book I read, a lesson in synthesizers and such was a bit overwhelming for me but I embraced it and did a lot of researching into what Rick was talking about. After going thru this route of learning about the technical aspects of production, I found that although the second edition was amazingly informative, I couldn't help but cringe at the way the author had written the book. Is synthesis really the first thing a beginner needs to understand when composing music?
After a year of getting my hands dirty on all the books I can find, and figuring out all the things that go into making dance music or producing music, I had finally began to see the bigger picture. Understanding frequencies and synthesizers and equalizers and compression and such. It didnt come without a fight tho because I had nooooo clue what they were. If you bought the second edition as a new producer you would understand what I meant by it being kind of out dated. The examples used for musical references I had never heard of so it was very hard for me to grasp what was going on. It seemed more like a intermediate book aimed at people with an already basic understanding my how the music works.
With that said, this edition goes back and updates all of the references to music made. It is absolutely amazing. In the first chapter instead of talking about synthesizers the author goes into basic and fundamental music theory that is the fundamentals of good music in my opinion.
For years I had the 2nd edition, and studied it until the cover fell off. Snoman does not waste your time with plugs for the latest software or gadget, but spent chapters of his book discussing every little nuance and detail of electronic dance music production with a solid emphasis on the analog fundamentals of sound synthesis, etc.
For this 3rd edition, Snoman outdid himself, and this book is now better than ever. There are completely new chapters, and many previous chapters have been updated to reflect the latest music trends and technologies.
The fundamentals are all still there, and I could spend hours studying some chapters of this book in front of my computer. His chapters on compressors, processors, effects, mixing structure, kicks and percussion, and sound design practice are very valuable.
But there are some fundamental flaws with this third edition that need to be corrected in the next edition. These flaws should not stop a serious student of electronic dance music from buying and reading this book repeatedly. But they should be noted.
First, the book is very poorly edited and full of typos and grammar mistakes - roughly 2 - 3 mistakes per page. Second, Snoman's style is at times a bit too casual in a very colloquial British manner, and assumes a bit too much background knowledge on his readers' part. I often found myself struggling to follow what he was saying. For example, I just randomly opened up to a page discussing how to program the lead in a song and Snoman writes "a common approach... is to construct a harmonically rich sound through saw, square, triangle and noise waveforms along with ... the unison feature... Once a harmonically rich voice is created, it can then be thinned...
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