March 11, 2006

ED DRISCOLL lists some great how-to books on music.

I'd add a couple of others.

The Sound Reinforcement Handbook is the single best reference for audio engineers anywhere. Read this book and you'll know more than 80% of the guys calling themselves "sound engineers" out there. If you can do math, 90%.

Blues Guitar Inside And Out: I gave this to my brother when he started playing blues guitar, and now he's a great blues guitarist. The book obviously gets the credit. Plus, I managed to cite it in a constitutional law article once.

Donald Passman's All You Need to Know About the Music Business. Maybe not quite, but it's a great start.

And though it's not quite a how-to, Paul Theberge's Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology, an interesting history of electronic music. I cited it in the New Orleans rave case brief.

UPDATE: Okay, it's not a book, but I might as well plug the techno/rave documentary Better Living Through Circuitry, which I think is just excellent.