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The Book Beat
While I write regularly for music magazines, including Electronic Musician, Keyboard, and Mix, not to mention the odd website, I'm a restless soul, so I write books too. In 2004 I produced two of them, one on music technology and another on music theory:
Power Tools for Synthesizer Programming. Though it won't replace
an owner's manual, this book brings together in one place all of the basic information
you'll need in order to make good use of your synthesizer. Topics include envelopes,
filters, operating systems, effects, and so on. The CD, while not a deathless
source of inspiration (translation: there's no music on it), contains numerous audio
examples. I've received a number of inquiries from people who are teaching
synthesizers and/or electronic music composition at colleges and want to consider
this title as a possible textbook.
For the record, one technical error has been found in the book. The sidebar on page 86 should have said that each pole in a filter introduces 6dB per octave of rolloff slope, not 3dB. A 2-pole filter has a 12dB per octave slope and a 4-pole filter 24dB per octave.
Chords & Harmony. This book provides a thorough, yet practical look at
harmony theory as used
in European/American jazz, pop, and classical music. Founding Keyboard editor Tom
Darter edited the book and rescued me from several quasi-obscure gaffes and blunders.
If you freeze when you see a chord chart that says "F9b5," this is a book you won't
want to miss. I call it "the music theory textbook for people who
don't really want to wade through a music theory textbook." According to the Oct.
2004 issue of Electronic Musician, the book "gives
the reader a vacabulary for communicating with other musicians and a conceptual
framework for understanding the inner workings of music itself.... Aikin's book
can be a valuable and eye-opening resource."
Other Power Tools titles. The Power Tools series from Backbeat, for which I'm the series editor, includes several titles in addition to my own. Kurt Kurasaki's Power Tools for Reason 3.0 will be a must-have for every Reason owner. It includes dozens of step-by-step examples of advanced sound design -- and I've learned a lot about Reason by testing them all. Frequent Keyboard contributor Francis Preve has written two Power Tools books: Software for Loop Music and Power Tools for GarageBand. A book by David Rubin on BIAS Peak Pro 5 should be out by the time you read this.