Understanding Records: A Field Guide to Recording Practice

Description

This is an accessible and comprehensive survey of core production and engineering techniques used in popular music since 1945. Recording Practice is musical practice, a technical but artistic affair. "Understanding Records" explains the musical language of Recording Practice in a way that any interested reader can understand. Drawing on readily available hit records produced since 1945, each section of this book explains a handful of core production and engineering techniques in chronological record-making sequence, elucidating how those techniques work, what they sound like, how they function musically, where listeners can hear those techniques at work in the broader Top 40 soundscape, and where they fit in the broader record-making process at large.

Jay Hodgson currently teaches popular music practice and history, and the 'project' paradigm of production and engineering, at the University of Western Ontario, as part of North America's first (and only) Bachelor of Arts in Popular Music Studies and Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture programs. He received the Governor General's Gold Medal at the University of Alberta in 2006, partially in recognition of his research on recording practice.

"A lucid digest of the vast technical literature that documents the past fifty-odd years of sound recording practices. Hodgson explains how equipment choices and processing techniques relate to the musical goals and meanings they serve, illuminating for popular music studies the arcane complexities of how records are crafted." - Robert Walser, Case Western Reserve University