The Recording Engineer's Handbook

by Bobby Owsinski

Book Overview

Bobby Owsinski's The Recording Engineer's Handbook has become a music industry standard, and this fully updated fourth edition once again offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159863867X
• ISBN13: 9781598638677
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: Alfred Music
• Length: 999 Pages
• Weight: 2.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 8.4" x 10.8"

Customer Reviews

Worth Every Penny

As a life-long professional musician, having studied with a many teachers both privately and at university, I would claim the goal of any method/instruction book is to allow the student come away with several solid concepts that can be applied effectively over the course of their lifetime - professional or otherwise. No one text can do it all. This books comes close however. It does the job well, and is worth every penny. For me, the high-points of this text involve microphone design and placement (which is very extensive), followed by a large collection of well-constructed interviews of famous audio engineers, who record (or have recorded) everything from rock, pop, orchestral, opera, string quartets, famous vocalists, Broadway and film. Perhaps the best thing about this book is it leaves you (it did me) with a burning desire to run to your studio and experiment and try new ideas and concepts. a minor low point. A page-and-a-half on how to use a compressor limiter is almost irresponsible. The book describes what a comp/limiter can do, but doesn't offer the most basic of concepts for how to do them. This seems incredibly odd to me for a book entitled "The Recording Engineers Handbook!" Compressor limiters are possibly the most abused and misunderstood audio processing device, and why this text does not cover this subject more fully is puzzling. Fortunately, many engineers who are interviewed in this book do elaborate on their use of compression/limiting, so all is not lost. Also, although this did not apply for my need, anyone looking to learn about engineering and mixing in 5.1 surround will benefit from this book, as their is an entire chapter devoted to this format. To close, the information presented here is fantastic, and is well worth every penny (IMO, just for the information regarding mic placement techniques) but you will get so much more!

Amazing Help for the NEWB

This book is amazing on so many fronts. If you are just starting out in the world of music recording this is a must have. You will learn so much on so many different fronts. It starts you out at the very beginning and takes you through every aspect of recording. Even if you are fairly experienced but have never had much contact with other engineers, you'll learn an IMMENSE amount of stuff from this book. I've been recording in my bedroom for four years very unprofessionally, have even taken a college class in recording (which was mostly just the professor spending each class name dropping... so not very useful) and this book taught me more in the past two months than I seem to have learned in the past 4. It has really useful section on the most commonly used microphone models and preamps, which helped me to get a foothold on industry standards as well as common mic/preamp applications. It has a huge section with how-to guides for micing a large variety of instruments. And the interview section is great if you pay any attention to who records the albums you love. Getting first hand perspective on the approaches of some of the industry's top professionals is pretty invaluable. If you buy this I HIGHLY recommend also buying the Mixing Engineers Handbook. It's just as useful and accessible and will help turn your now well recorded songs in to amazingly mixed songs with the same simple approach and suggestions for common problems.

Cohesive and Multi-Faceted

I have been engineering recordings for about 5 years and felt this was perfect for someone who already knows the basics about recording and is ready to get into the good stuff. The suggested micing techniques were very helpful and complete and are an excellent resource for when you are not quite getting the sound you want when placing your microphones on a source. The book also recommends which microphone to choose for each application and sometimes gives a reasoning, for instance, why you should pick a ribbon mic over a dynamic in the situation at hand. These tips are very relevant and help you to make better micing decisions on your own in the future. The best feature of this book is that it references many talented and experienced engineers such as Steve Albini and Chuck Ainlay; their helpful side-notes and tips really put these suggestions into perspective and help you to think about recording in the proper manner. I really enjoyed the section written by the "Drum Doctor" because tuning drums and having a kit sound excellent is the most important step in getting a solid drum recording. Overall i would highly recommend this book to anyone who feels they want to broaden the scope of their knowledge about recording or wants to get some new ideas about tracking.

A great guide for a soon-to-be recording engineer

This book is the best on the market (as far as I know) and you don't need to be an expert to start using it. All you need to have is the interest for recording music/audio. It's a recommended purchase for every soon-to-be (wannabe?) recording engineer!

Good Companion

This one kept me very good company on an overnight flight to Vienna from New York. Riveting stuff, not least because there was a good chance I was going to have to oversee the micing of a full-orchestra and choir on one of the dates! Luckily for all concerned, my nascent skills were not called upon, but I certainly felt a lot more qualified after reading Owsinski's tome. Some of the gear described might be above the head of home/project studio owners, but nonetheless Owsinski's straightforward and eminently readable work offers fascinating insights into the vast art of recorded sound.