Practical Audio Amplifier Circuit Projects builds on the introduction to electronic circuits provided in Singmin's innovative and successful first book, Beginning Electronics Through Projects. Both books draw on the author's many years of experience as electronics professional and as hobbyist. As a result, his project descriptions are lively, practical, and very clear.

With this new volume, the reader can build relatively simple systems and achieve useable results quickly. The projects included here allow a hobbyist to build amplifier circuits, test them, and then put them into a system. Progress through a graduated series of learning activities culminates in unique devices that are nevertheless easy to build. Learn the basic building blocks of audio amplifier circuit design and then apply your knowledge to your own audio inventions.

Targets the intermediate to advanced reader with challenging projects that teach important circuit theories and principles
Provides a ready source of audio circuits to professional audio engineers
Includes an electric guitar pacer project that lets you "jam" with your favorite band

Little Labels -- Big Sound celebrates 10 legendary record labels, their founders and the artists they developed, people who created original and enduring music on the tide of social change. From the 1920s through the 1960s, scores of small, independent record companies nurtured distinctly American music: jazz, blues, gospel, country, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll. These companies, run on shoestring budgets, were on the fringe of mainstream culture. Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, James Brown, Roy Orbison, and other musicians brought regional American styles to a world audience and won enduring fame for themselves. But often forgotten are the colorful owners of small record labels who first recorded these musicians and helped to popularize their sound before the dominant, more bureaucratic competitors knew what had happened.

Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt bring alive the glory days of the independent labels and their colorful founders, many of whom were interviewed for this book. Sometimes these men were visionaries. Ross Russell, a record-store owner in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s, risked his last dollar to create Dial Records because he was convinced that an obscure jazz saxophonist named Charlie Parker was creating a music revolution with his bebop jazz. Sam Phillips in Memphis had recorded white country and black R&B singers in the early 1950s, so he knew exactly what he was looking for when a shy, teenaged Elvis Presley walked into his storefront studio in 1954 and asked to make a record.

Other owners had little appreciation for the music but were street-smart entrepreneurs. The white-owned "race" labels of the 1920s, for example, recognized a black consumer market thatthe recording business had previously ignored. Operating out of such cities as Houston, Memphis, Cincinnati, and New Orleans, these savvy business people promoted regional sounds that were to reverberate around the world.

But influencing the development of music wasn't what these record-label owners had in mind; they were just trying to earn a living. Today, when most of the independent record labels have gone under or have been gobbled up by big conglomerates, the music they produced on primitive equipment remains fresh -- and bigger than life.

Little Labels -- Big Sound tells with verve and affection the story of the people and the small homegrown companies who gave America its beat.

A comprehensive reference guide to the history of recording, this book combines the technical history of the recording process and the industry that grew up to support it, with the history of the musical, vocal and spoken repertoire that developed in parallel with recording. Starting with the simultaneous inventions of Charles Cros and Thomas Edison, the book charts the story of the phonograph from the earliest recordings by figures such as Brahms and Tennyson to the development of the modern gramophone. The complex patent and copyright history of early inventions is set out, as is the commercial climate in which the first record companies emerged. The late-19th-century musical legacy and its performance practice implications are discussed, leading to the pioneering work of, for example, Henry Wood and Thomas Beecham. Popular music history is also examined, on an international basis, with Argentine and Uruguayan tango records discussed alongside American ragtime and jazz and European operetta. The book also analyzes the recording boom before the Depression, the pre-war reconstruction of the industry, the emergence of recording entrepreneurs, disc jockeys and crooners, the emergence of rebetika in Europe, the Caribbean record industry, and the first libraries. In the post-war period, the book covers the breathtaking speed of technical development from EP to LP to cassette to CD, and the enormous explosion of popular music. The final chapters examine new technical innovations such as DAT and minidisc, and record-derived music techniques such as scratch, karaoke, dup and rap.

From behind the walls of a handful of well-hidden, unlikely recording studios in the Los Angeles area, legends-in-waiting created masterpiece albums. It was a time of astonishing creativity and unprecedented fame and fortune. It was also a time of unfettered excess that threatened to unravel everything along the way. With access that only a longtime music business insider can provide, Kent Hartman packs Goodnight, L.A. with never-before-told stories about the most prolific time and iconic place in rock 'n' roll history. He brings the stories to life through new in-depth interviews with classic rock artists and famous producers. What Hartman's The Wrecking Crew was to pop singles, AM radio, and the '60s, Goodnight, L.A. is to album cuts, FM radio, and the high-flying, hard-rocking '70s and '80s.

In the history of sound recording, the years from 1896 to 1926 mark the transformation of a carnival toy into a serious means of musical reproduction. This work documents for the first time an index of this transformation: the expansion of the repertoire from the marches and potpourris of the 1890s to the symphonic recordings of the late acoustical period. The data assembled bring together and organize materials that have lain scattered in archives, private collections, catalogues, trade journals, and in the research of more than three dozen discographers to provide as complete a survey of classical and light classical orchestral music recorded acoustically on cylinders and discs as sources allow. In this work, band records are excluded (except in the case of works originally written for winds). Where it is known and where it is pertinent to the recordings, biographical information about conductors and historical information about orchestras are added, as are all available discographic data, including reissues. The work is fully indexed. Of interest to historians and students, private collectors, archivists, and discographers.

This is a new edition, in paperback, of Ken Pohlmann's classic survey of the compact disc world, The Compact Disc: A Handbook of Theory and Use, and celebrates the tenth birthday of possibly the most successful consumer electronics product ever introduced. The phenomenal success of the compact disc - currently over a billion copies are sold each year - has encouraged rapid development of compact disc technology and spawned entirely new applications for it. The text of this new edition has been thoroughly overhauled to take note of all these developments; in addition there is more information on the laboratory origins of the compact disc and the principles underlying the format. It remains a comprehensive and authoritative handbook by an acknowledged expert on digital audio and related topics.

‘Shellac and Swing!’ tells the story of the gramophone’s ‘golden age,’ from 1900-1955, when it helped to shape Britain’s culture from the arts to warfare. The story focuses on the gramophone, the invention of Emile Berliner in the 1880s, but begins with a brief outline of the first attempts to record the human voice and of Edison’s invention of the cylinder and the phonograph. It uses primary evidence, images and interviews with DJs, fans, musicians and historians to explore this fascinating and often eccentric tale. Each chapter ends with ‘On the Record,’ a discussion of a record that relates to the chapter’s themes. Although the gramophone and its fragile shellac discs were vital to Britain’s music scene—opera and music hall, the Jazz Age, the crooners, early rock’n’roll—its impact was far more extensive. Its place in British history encompasses advertising and design, fraud and piracy, phallic symbols, talking books, the threat from radio and TV, the contrasting worlds of the Salvation Army and adult ‘party’ discs, the creation of a parliamentary insult, new political strategies and the seditious activity of the Mau Mau. From the establishment of the Gramophone Company in London in the late 1890s to the end of shellac record production in the 1950s, the British public bought the machines and the discs in their millions and the record labels made stars of performers like Caruso, Harry Lauder, Al Bowlly and Dame Nellie Melba. ‘Shellac and Swing!’ explores the ways in which the gramophone helped these singers to achieve stardom but it also explores in detail and for the first time many other stories of not-so-famous performers, of the gramophone in political electioneering and of forgotten technology: the first pirate radio broadcasters, the soldiers who took their ‘Trench Decca’ portables to the Western Front, the invention of the Flame-O-Phone, the People’s Budget recordings and the pioneering label owner and producer of ‘blue’ discs. The gramophone’s heyday ended with the rise of rock ’n ’roll, teenagers, the 45 rpm single, the LP and the record player, but it survives today as part of a vibrant contemporary music, fashion and lifestyle scene.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production provides a detailed overview of current research on the production of mono and stereo recorded music. The handbook consists of 33 chapters, each written by leaders in the field of music production. Examining the technologies and places of music production as well the broad range of practices - organization, recording, desktop production, post-production and distribution - this edited collection looks at production as it has developed around the world. In addition, rather than isolating issues such as gender, race and sexuality in separate chapters, these points are threaded throughout the entire text.

_________ 'Hepworth's knowledge and understanding of rock history is prodigious ... [a] hugely entertaining study of the LP's golden age' The Times _________ The era of the LP began in 1967, with 'Sgt Pepper'; The Beatles didn't just collect together a bunch of songs, they Made An Album. Henceforth, everybody else wanted to Make An Album. The end came only fifteen years later, coinciding with the release of Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. By then the Walkman had taken music out of the home and into the streets and the record business had begun trying to reverse-engineer the creative process in order to make big money. Nobody would play music or listen to it in quite the same way ever again. It was a short but transformative time. Musicians became 'artists' and we, the people, patrons of the arts. The LP itself had been a mark of sophistication, a measure of wealth, an instrument of education, a poster saying things you dare not say yourself, a means of attracting the opposite sex, and, for many, the single most desirable object in their lives. This is the story of that time; it takes us from recording studios where musicians were doing things that had never been done before to the sparsely furnished apartments where their efforts would be received like visitations from a higher power. This is the story of how LPs saved our lives.

Foreword- PART I. BASICS - 1. Introduction 2. Studio Planning 3. Sound Insulation 4. Reverberation 5. Air-Conditioning System Noise Limits 6. Sound-Retardant Windows and Doors 7. Instrument Isolation for Multiple Track Recording 8. Studio Testing 9. Plumbing Noise Control 10. Vibration Isolation 11. Suspended Acoustic Ceiling 12. Elevators 13. Interior Decor of Studios 14. Sound Power Versus Sound Pressure PART II. STUDIOS - 15. Control Rooms 16. ADR Studios 17. Re-Recording Studios 18. Reverberation Chambers 19. Motion Picture and TV Stages 20. Music Recording Studios 21. Review Rooms 22. Future Sound-Recording Studios 23. Canopied Amphitheaters PART III. ELECTROACOUSTICS - 24. Microphone Properties 25. Loudspeaker Sensitivity 26. Electronic Light Dimmers - Index Sound recording studios are often built like showcases, either to attract clientele or to provide a distinctive image for the industry. They are, thus, like people, in that no two of them are alike. Yet, all such structures have to have certain common acoustic elements if they are to function to the best artistic and economic advantages. The enclosures must be sufficiently quiet, exhibit proper reverberatory conditions (often required to be adjustable), be devoid of parallelisms between hard surfaces, have no sound-focusing concave surfaces, be free of vibrations from external and internal sources, etc. It is for the purpose of providing first design principles of sound recording studios that this book has been prepared, so that for any given size structure, satisfactory vocal and instrumental recording conditions can be established therein. All equations involving physical quantities are given both in the English and the MKS system of measurement. Also, when the description of existing studios includes linear dimensions, their metric equivalents follow in parenthesis, as is also done for such quantities as surface density (mass per unit area) and sound absorption.

Founded in 1917, Paramount Records incongruously was one of several homegrown record labels of a Wisconsin chair-making company. The company pinned no outsized hopes on Paramount. Its founders knew nothing of the music business, and they had arrived at the scheme of producing records only to drive sales of the expensive phonograph cabinets they had recently begun manufacturing. Lacking the resources and the interest to compete for top talent, Paramount's earliest recordings gained little foothold with the listening public. On the threshold of bankruptcy, the label embarked on a new business plan: selling the music of Black artists to Black audiences. It was a wildly successful move, with Paramount eventually garnering many of the biggest-selling titles in the "race records" era. Inadvertently, the label accomplished what others could not, making blues, jazz, and folk music performed by Black artists a popular and profitable genre. Paramount featured a deep roster of legendary performers, including Louis Armstrong, Charley Patton, Ethel Waters, Son House, Fletcher Henderson, Skip James, Alberta Hunter, Blind Blake, King Oliver, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Johnny Dodds, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Jelly Roll Morton. Scott Blackwood's The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records is the story of happenstance. But it is also a tale about the sheer force of the Great Migration and the legacy of the music etched into the shellacked grooves of a 78 rpm record. With Paramount Records, Black America found its voice. Through creative nonfiction, Blackwood brings to life the gifted artists and record producers who used Paramount to revolutionize American music. Felled by the Great Depression, the label stopped recording in 1932, leaving a legacy of sound pressed into cheap 78s that is among the most treasured and influential in American history.

Written by one of the most prominent thinkers in sound studies, Amplifications presents a perspective on sound narrated through the experiences of a sound artist and writer. A work of reflective philosophy, Amplifications sits at the intersection of history, creative practice, and sound studies, recounting this narrative through a series of themes (rattles, echoes, recordings, etc.). Carter offers a unique perspective on migratory poetics, bringing together his own compositions and life's works while using his personal narrative to frame larger theoretical questions about sound and migration.

Today, jazz is considered high art, America's national music, and the catalog of its recordings-its discography-is often taken for granted. But behind jazz discography is a fraught and highly colorful history of research, fanaticism, and the simple desire to know who played what, where, and when. This history gets its first full-length treatment in Bruce D. Epperson's More Important Than the Music. Following the dedicated few who sought to keep jazz's legacy organized, Epperson tells a fascinating story of archival pursuit in the face of negligence and deception, a tale that saw curses and threats regularly employed, with fisticuffs and lawsuits only slightly rarer. Epperson examines recorded jazz from its careless handling as a novelty in the 1920s and '30s, through the deluge of 12-inch vinyl in the middle of the twentieth century, to the use of computers by today's discographers. Though he focuses much of his attention on comprehensive discographies, he also examines the development of a variety of related listings, such as buyer's guides and library catalogs, and he closes with a look toward discography's future. From the little black book to the full-featured online database, More Important Than the Music offers a history not just of jazz discography but of the profoundly human desire to preserve history itself.

Awarded a Certificate of Merit at the ARSC Awards for Excellence 2018 In the past two decades digital technologies have fundamentally changed the way we think about, make and use popular music. From the production of multimillion selling pop records to the ubiquitous remix that has become a marker of Web 2.0, the emergence of new music production technologies have had a transformative effect upon 21st Century digital culture. Sonic Technologies examines these issues with a specific focus upon the impact of digitization upon creativity; that is, what musicians, cultural producers and prosumers do. For many, music production has moved out of the professional recording studio and into the home. Using a broad range of examples ranging from experimental electronic music to more mainstream genres, the book examines how contemporary creative practice is shaped by the visual and sonic look and feel of recording technologies such as Digital Audio Workstations.

In Chasing Sound, Susan Schmidt Horning traces the cultural and technological evolution of recording studios in the United States from the first practical devices to the modern multi-track studios of the analog era. Charting the technical development of studio equipment, the professionalization of recording engineers, and the growing collaboration between artists and technicians, she shows how the earliest efforts to capture the sound of live performances eventually resulted in a trend toward studio creations that extended beyond live shows, ultimately reversing the historic relationship between live and recorded sound. Schmidt Horning draws from a wealth of original oral interviews with major labels and independent recording engineers, producers, arrangers, and musicians, as well as memoirs, technical journals, popular accounts, and sound recordings. Recording engineers and producers, she finds, influenced technological and musical change as they sought to improve the sound of records. By investigating the complex relationship between sound engineering and popular music, she reveals the increasing reliance on technological intervention in the creation as well as in the reception of music. The recording studio, she argues, is at the center of musical culture in the twentieth century.

Ever wonder what goes into the creation of some of the best music ever recorded? Ever wonder how someone becomes an iconic professional who is universally admired and respected? Al Schmitt on the Record: The Magic Behind the Music reveals answers to those questions and more. In this memoir of one of the most respected engineers of all time, you'll see how a very young boy mentored by his uncle Harry who owned Apex Recording Studio in New York progressed through the recording world in its infancy, under the mentorship of Tom Dowd, in its heyday, becoming one of the all-time great recording engineers. And now today Al continues as an unstoppable force at the top of the recording world with his name on mega-hits from the likes of Paul McCartney to Lady Gaga, and Diana Krall to Dylan. Al's credits include a veritable who's who of the music world. Reading the compelling accounts of Al's life in the studio, you'll see how he has been able to stay at the top of his game since the '50s, and you'll experience what is was like behind the scenes and in-the-studio during of many of his historic, impactful recordings. Schmitt also shares many of the recording techniques and creative approaches that have set him apart, including his approach to microphones, effects, and processors, and he even shares setup diagrams from many of his highly-lauded recording sessions! Inspiring story of the audio industry icon, Al Schmitt. Al shares insights into the way recordings are made at the highest level.

Electronic music instruments weren't called synthesizers until the 1950s, but their lineage began in 1919 with Russian inventor Lev Sergeyevich Termen's development of the Etherphone, now known as the Theremin. From that point, synthesizers have undergone a remarkable evolution from prohibitively large mid-century models confined to university laboratories to the development of musical synthesis software that runs on tablet computers and portable media devices.
Throughout its history, the synthesizer has always been at the forefront of technology for the arts. In The Synthesizer: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding, Programming, Playing, and Recording the Ultimate Electronic Music Instrument, veteran music technology journalist, educator, and performer Mark Vail tells the complete story of the synthesizer: the origins of the many forms the instrument takes; crucial advancements in sound generation, musical control, and composition made with instruments that may have become best sellers or gone entirely unnoticed; and the basics and intricacies of acoustics and synthesized sound. Vail also describes how to successfully select, program, and play a synthesizer; what alternative controllers exist for creating electronic music; and how to stay focused and productive when faced with a room full of instruments. This one-stop reference guide on all things synthesizer also offers tips on encouraging creativity, layering sounds, performance, composing and recording for film and television, and much more.

Recording Tips for Music Educators: A Practical Guide for Recording School Groups provides a go-to guide for music educators to plan and execute a successful recording project for school groups. For those teachers who are not comfortable with the recording process, this book functions as a catalyst to becoming comfortable with the planning, execution, and use of a school recording project. One of the most valuable tools for teaching is for students to be able to evaluate themselves. A good recording of the group helps students listen critically and make accurate evaluations of how well they have performed literature they have been taught over time. Covering planning, equipment needs, and equipment use, Recording Tips for Music Educators ensures that educators not trained in music production will be able to create praise-worthy recordings.

Few aspects of daily existence are untouched by technology. Learning and teaching music are no exceptions and arguably have been impacted as much or more than other areas of life. Digital technologies have come to affect music learning and teaching in profound ways, influencing how we create, listen, share, consume, interact, and conceptualize musical practices and the musical experience. For a discipline as entrenched in tradition as music education, this has brought forth myriad views on what does and should constitute music learning and teaching. To tease out and elucidate some of the salient problems, interests, and issues, The Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education critically situates technology in relation to music education from a variety of perspectives: historical; philosophical; socio-cultural; pedagogical; musical; economic; policy, organized around four broad themes: Emergence and Evolution; Locations and Contexts: Social and Cultural Issues; Experiencing, Expressing, Learning and Teaching; and Competence, Credentialing, and Professional Development. Chapters from a highly diverse group of junior and senior scholars provide analyses of technology and music education through intersections of gender, theoretical perspective, geographical distribution, and relationship to the field. The Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education's dedication to diversity and forward-facing discussion promotes contrasting perspectives and conversational voices rather than reinforce traditional narratives and prevailing discourses.

Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age explores the relationship between macro environmental factors, such as politics, economics, culture and technology, captured by terms such as 'post-digital' and 'post-internet'. It also discusses the creation, monetisation and consumption of music and what changes in the music industry can tell us about wider shifts in economy and culture. This collection of 13 case studies covers issues such as curation algorithms, blockchain, careers of mainstream and independent musicians, festivals and clubs-to inform greater understanding and better navigation of the popular music landscape within a global context.

In this practical, project-based book, music students, educators, and coders receive the necessary tools to engage with real-world experiences in computation and creativity using the programming language Scratch. Designed to teach students the fundamental concepts of computational thinking through interactive music, sound, and media, projects vary in complexity and encourage readers to make music through playing and creating music. This book introduces readers to concepts in computational thinking and coding alongside parallel concepts in music, creative sound, and interaction. The book begins with a gentle introduction to the Scratch 3.0 programming environment through hands-on projects using a computer keyboard and mouse to make music and control sounds, creating original sounds, and performing them as an instrument. The next chapters introduce programming musical sequences, melodies, and structures, and assembling them into a virtual band that can be performed live or automated through algorithms. The final chapters explore computational thinking and music in the contexts of making games with sound effects, teaching the computer to generate music using algorithms and rules, interacting with music using live video, finishing with a chapter on musical live coding, where readers will create and manipulate computer code to perform, improvise, and create original music live.

In this rich study of noise in American film-going culture, Meredith C. Ward shows how aurality can reveal important fissures in American motion picture history, enabling certain types of listening cultures to form across time. Connecting this history of noise in the cinema to a greater sonic culture, Static in the System shows how cinema sound was networked into a broader constellation of factors that affected social power, gender, sexuality, class, the built environment, and industry, and how these factors in turn came to fruition in cinema's soundscape. Focusing on theories of power as they manifest in noise, the history of noise in electro-acoustics with the coming of film sound, architectural acoustics as they were manipulated in cinema theaters, and the role of the urban environment in affecting mobile listening and the avoidance of noise, Ward analyzes the powerful relationship between aural cultural history and cinema's sound theory, proving that noise can become a powerful historiographic tool for the film historian.

Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of "absolute" instrumental music. In this original, provocative book, Arved Ashby argues that recording technology has transformed our understanding of art music. Contesting the laments of nostalgic critics, Ashby sees recordings as socially progressive and instruments of a musical vernacular, but also finds that recording and absolute music actually involve similar notions of removing sound from context. He takes stock of technology's impact on classical music, addressing the questions at the heart of the issue. This erudite yet concise study reveals how mechanical reproduction has transformed classical musical culture and the very act of listening, breaking down aesthetic and generational barriers and mixing classical music into the soundtrack of everyday life.