Producer Bibles

Intro­duc­tion

Today I’m going to talk about books. More specif­i­cally books that I believe every pro­ducer should have in his library. All of these books are the most pop­u­lar ones in their cat­e­gory on Amazon.com and as such, I think that’s a good indi­ca­tion of their qual­ity, which is why I’ve included them here. The books cov­ered are as follows:

• The Dance Music Man­ual: Tools, Toys and Techniques
• Com­plete Idiot’s Guide to Music Theory
• How to Make a Noise: A Com­pre­hen­sive Guide to Syn­the­sizer Programming
• The Mix­ing Engineer’s Handbook
• Mas­ter­ing Audio: The Art and the Science
• How to Write a Hit Song: The Com­plete Guide to Writ­ing and Mar­ket­ing Chart-Topping Lyrics & Music
• How to Be a Hit Song­writer: Pol­ish­ing and Mar­ket­ing Your Lyrics and Music

The Dance Music Man­ual: Tools, Toys and Techniques

This book is by far the book that cov­ers the most aspects of audio pro­duc­tion of the books I’ve listed. I have never encoun­tered any­thing quite like it. This is my go-to book when­ever I have a ques­tion about any­thing in music/audio pro­duc­tion. It cov­ers what tools there are and exactly how every­thing works (for exam­ple, that’s where I learned about com­pres­sion, if you’ve read my tuto­r­ial). It cov­ers syn­the­sis, music the­ory (basic) and will show you how to pro­gram your own drums in any syn­the­sizer. It cov­ers dif­fer­ent elec­tronic dance music (EDM) gen­res, their char­ac­ter­is­tics and rec­om­mended lis­ten­ing (incl. trance). While it isn’t very good at explain­ing these gen­res, it at least tries to give you a summed up ver­sion of it. It also explains physics in a way that’s easy to under­stand. Another good thing about this book is that the author is very down to earth and under­stands the needs of the per­son buy­ing a book like this and as such doesn’t demand that the reader buys plug-ins for thou­sands of pounds, but rather tries to give you alter­na­tives to inex­pen­sive tools that sound great.
If you read any­thing at all, make it this book.

Com­plete Idiot’s Guide to Music Theory

This book is very use­ful and will show you how to read nota­tion, teach you about rhythm and the G-clef zZzZzZzZz — AHEM! Sorry… This book will teach you how to write proper melodies and it shows you how and why cer­tain melodies are catch­ier than oth­ers. It will teach you how you can make sure that your melodies are in key and how you can fix your melodies when they aren’t. What’s more inter­est­ing about this though is that it will teach you things that you didn’t even know you could learn. This will give you a com­pletely new insight into melodies and you’ll be able to spit out riffs and tons of vari­a­tions thereof (all in key, of course) in no time at all. I was very impressed by this book and thought it cov­ered every areas exten­sively. It doesn’t go in-depth into com­po­si­tional the­ory, but there are other books designed for that. It will how­ever give you all the tools you need in order to learn more about com­po­si­tional theory.

How to Make a Noise: A Com­pre­hen­sive Guide to Syn­the­sizer Programming

I haven’t read this book and thus can’t really say any­thing about how it’s writ­ten, but it seems very good and I’m look­ing for­ward to read­ing this once I’m done read­ing my other books. There’s a free on-line ver­sion of this on noisesculpture.com that shows you down-to-earth real-world exam­ples of patches that you can cre­ate on very pop­u­lar plu­g­ins. The infor­ma­tion on it can be applied on any syn­the­sizer, so it’s def­i­nitely worth a look or two if you’re stuck on your syn­the­sis skills. No mat­ter if you’re patch junkie or a syn­the­sis purist, this will help you get the most out of your synthesizers.

The Mix­ing Engineer’s Handbook

With­out a doubt, the best book I’ve read on Mix­ing the­ory. It explains exactly how you should think of a mix and helped me improve myself a lot. I had read and seen a lot of mate­r­ial on how to mix your tracks, but it wasn’t until I read this book that my skills lit­er­ally sky­rock­eted. It shows you var­i­ous exam­ples of real-world tracks so that you can eas­ily fol­low the exam­ples and hear for your­self what the author is try­ing to show you. It explains exactly the how and why of every­thing. Com­pres­sion, EQ, stereo-positioning, etc. are all cov­ered in a humane mat­ter. The author of this book is not stuck up like a lot of other suc­cess­ful musi­cians seem to be (sadly) and that only makes the book even more enjoyable.

Mas­ter­ing Audio: The Art and the Science

If you want to get into mas­ter­ing, this is the book of choice, but per­son­ally, I believe every com­pe­tent pro­ducer should own a copy of this book. Writ­ten by one of the most promi­nent fig­ures alive in this area (Bob Katz, inven­tor of the K-metering-system) and read and rec­om­mended by lots of Mas­ter­ing Engi­neers (includ­ing Ruffage of Pure­Fo­cus Mas­ter­ing). It goes very in-depth into a lot of tech­ni­cal areas of audio and will teach you all about bitrates, bit­depth, sam­pler­ates, com­pres­sors, etc.

How to Write a Hit Song: The Com­plete Guide to Writ­ing and Mar­ket­ing Chart-Topping Lyrics & Music

This book had some very inspi­ra­tional tips and it shows you how a well-structured lyric is sup­posed to look and the author also gives some inspi­ra­tional advice. This was rec­om­mended to me and it was a fun read, but the author how­ever is clearly very full of her­self, which makes this a pain to read some­times, espe­cially when the first thing you read in the book is an angsty rant on how music has become wide-spread because of the Inter­net and how her roy­al­ties suf­fer because of this, although she clearly makes a very good liv­ing off her songs. She is also a bit detached and tries giv­ing legal advice which is just not pos­si­ble for those start­ing out.
The exer­cises make up for this though and it’s actu­ally a decent read.

How to Be a Hit Song­writer: Pol­ish­ing and Mar­ket­ing Your Lyrics and Music

This is the fol­low up of the for­mer book and gen­er­ally has some good exer­cises as well. It does suf­fer from the same thing as the first one though; the author. While the first book is more focused on get­ting the basics cov­ered, this book is more focused on teach­ing you new tech­niques so that you won’t suf­fer from lack of inspiration.

Final Thoughts

I think there are some really nice books out there, espe­cially the Dance Music Man­ual. I’ve listed them all in the order that I would read them. I’ve listed them like this after impor­tance. The first book will cover the basics of all areas of pro­duc­tion, but doesn’t go too in-depth whereas the lat­ter books demand that you have some degree of expe­ri­ence in the area cov­ered, but give you that final push from ama­teur to pro­fes­sional. As such, I wouldn’t rec­om­mend get­ting too caught up on mas­ter­ing before you know how a track is usu­ally arranged. You can get by with­out the song­writ­ing books (unless you want to give your lyrics a nice pol­ish) and while a lot of peo­ple will say “you don’t need music the­ory to write awe­some tracks,” I believe they’re for­get­ting that know­ing your the­ory will teach you how to write even bet­ter tracks!
I hope this tuto­r­ial has inspired you, that you’ll learn stuff you didn’t even know were pos­si­ble and that all the pieces will finally start com­ing together. All your ques­tions should be answered, but when in doubt, use your Google-skills.
Have you read any of these books or plan on doing so? In that case, go ahead and let me know what you think!

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