So you want books that are in-depth, but not technical? Imagine if you were a
dentist with the same approach. You want to learn how to fill cavities, but
you don't want to know the boring technical details about teeth or anaesthetics
or any of that hokum. You want to be a racecar driver, but you don't care how
cars work. Sorry, but the devil's in the details. It's the pit crew that wins
races, just like it's the technically aware engineer who makes great
recordings. If you want to intuitively understand how to use the gear and how
best to connect it all together, then you must intuitively understand how it
works and what it's doing. You have to understand WHY you don't get good
results plugging a hi-Z instrument directly into a low-Z mike preamp if you
want to apply that knowledge to a wider ranger of applications. Otherwise
you're just painting by numbers. You want a book that tells you where to set
the knobs on your equalizer? The author of the book hasn't heard the recording
on which you're working, so the best he can tell you is what those knobs do. A
"shallow" description might tell you that one picks a frequency and one boosts
or cuts it. But if that's all you know, you'll be really frustrated when you
go to use an actual equalizer and it doesn't behave like you thought it would.
A more in-depth description of what the EQ's knobs do will get into the
technical details about bandwidth and Q and the limitations of the circuitry
(op amp slew rate, inductor saturation, etc) so you'll understand why and how,
under some circumstances, the EQ reacts differently than you might have
expected. Now you can expect what it will actually do, and you can anticipate
when that reaction will be a hindrance and when it will make you wet yourself.
Aside from technical knowledge, what you need for learning practical recording
techniques isn't a book but a mentor. Everybody doesn't have to reinvent the
wheel as you suggets because most engineers have historically gotten their
start in a studio under the wing of a more experienced engineer. Now that
system has kind of fallen apart since we're talking about thousands of new
engineers recording in their homes, but luckily we have forums like this one to
get old old guys and the young kids together to exchange ideas. You can teach
Mike Rivers about all this new computer stuff and he'll teach you how to set up
an EQ on a compressor sidechain. It'll work out fine.

ulysses


(Ignace Dhont) wrote:
I am just amazed that there doesn't seem to be ANY book with ANY
in-depth info on things like mixing techniques. At my local bookstore
the audio books all hold the same basic info like "use a pop shield
when recording vocals (..)".

There are several technical audio books like the "Handbook of Sound
Engineers" (Ballou) that are good but I'm not very interested in the
technical side of the story.

So, please could anyone recommend me some books or internet articles
that holds info that goes deeper than level 1. For example, I'm
already aware that it takes more than a panpot to create a stereo
image, but detailled info on how to go about is nowhere to be found..

Thanks in advance,

Ignace

For starters here are a couple of books I found I liked:
Master Handbook of Acoustics (Alton Everest) – easy to read and
understand.
Project Studios (Philip Newell) – a good place to start.
Mastering Audio (Bob Katz) – about.. mastering. Have just started
reading, but looks interesting.
The Art of Recording (William Moylan) – this one is about ear
training, dry to read but with interesting info.