Making great audio recordings requires striking the right balance between technical know-how and practical understanding of recording sessions. Even in the digital age, some of the most important aspects of creating and recording music are non-technical and, as a result, are often overlooked by traditional recording manuals. The Art of Digital Audio Recording teaches readers what they really need to know in order to make great sound recordings with computers - both the practical and the technical information, including:

. What to look and listen for in a recording environment
. Straightforward advice on recording almost any instrument
. Essentials of digital audio workstations
. Essentials of recording gear: microphones, mixers, and speakers
. Fundamentals of understanding and applying EQ, compression, delay, and reverb
. Secrets to running creative recording sessions
. Practical application of digital editing, mixing, and mastering
A special section identifies solutions to the most common challenges in the recording studio, and the book also features an addendum with essential tips and reference information including:

. How to walk into a commercial studio and be the engineer
. Researching and buying gear: Internet vs. brick and mortar
. Digital formats: A handy reference
As a whole, The Art of Digital Audio Recording is an essential resource that gives recordists the tools they need to let technical understanding serve greater musical goals."

"So, I've written a book.

Having entertained the idea for years, and even offered a few questionable opportunities (‘It’s a piece of cake! Just do four hours of interviews, find someone else to write it, put your face on the cover, and voila!’), I have decided to write these stories just as I have always done, in my own hand. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I’ve recorded and can’t wait to share with the world, or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or even hearing my voice bounce between the Kiss posters on my wall as a child. This certainly doesn’t mean that I’m quitting my day job, but it does give me a place to shed a little light on what it’s like to be a kid from Springfield, Virginia, walking through life while living out the crazy dreams I had as young musician.

From hitting the road with Scream at 18 years old, to my time in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, jamming with Iggy Pop or playing at the Academy Awards or dancing with AC/DC and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, drumming for Tom Petty or meeting Sir Paul McCartney at Royal Albert Hall, bedtime stories with Joan Jett or a chance meeting with Little Richard, to flying halfway around the world for one epic night with my daughters… the list goes on.

I look forward to focusing the lens through which I see these memories a little sharper for you with much excitement." - Dave Grohl

Nino Rota is one of the most important composers in the history of cinema. Both popular and prolific, he wrote some of the most cherished and memorable of all film music - for The Godfather Parts I and II, The Leopard, the Zeffirelli Shakespeares, nearly all of Fellini and for more than 140 popular Italian movies. Yet his music does not quite work in the way that we have come to assume music in film works: it does not seek to draw us in and identify, nor to overwhelm and excite us. In itself, in its pretty but reticent melodies, its at once comic and touching rhythms, and in its relation to what's on screen, Rota's music is close and affectionate towards characters and events but still restrained, not detached but ironically attached. In this major new study of Rota's film career, Richard Dyer gives a detailed account of Rota's aesthetic, suggesting it offers a new approach to how we understand both film music and feeling and film more broadly. He also provides a first full account in English of Rota's life and work, linking it to notions of plagiarism and pastiche, genre and convention, irony and narrative. Rota's practice is related to some of the major ways music is used in film, including the motif, musical reference, underscoring and the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic music, revealing how Rota both conforms to and undermines standard conceptions. In addition, Dyer considers the issue of gay cultural production, Rota's favourte genre, comedy, and his productive collaboration with the director Federico Fellini.