Describes digital musical instruments, industries that supply and promote them, and the meanings they have for musicians. Winner of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Book Award (1997) Recent innovations in musical instrument design are not simply a response to the needs of musicians, writes Paul Théberge; they also have become "a driving force with which musicians must contend." He argues that digital synthesizers, samplers, and sequencers in studio production and in the home have caused musicians to rely increasingly on manufacturers for both the instruments themselves as well as the very sounds and musical patterns that they use to make music. Musical practices have thus become allied with a new type of consumer practice that is altogether different from earlier relationships between musicians and their instruments as a means of production. Théberge places these developments within a broad social and historical perspective that examines the development of the musical instrument industry, particularly the piano industry, the economic and cultural role of musicians' magazines and computer networks, and the fundamental relationships between musical concepts, styles, and technology.

The process of getting a record deal can be long and frustrating. Five years is the average amount of time between the moment a band or musician decides they are ready for one until they actually get a contract. And it can take longer; bands who seem to be “overnight sensations” have often been playing together and making demos for seven to ten years. Having a good understanding of where you’re going and exactly what you are pursuing may make some of the inevitable setbacks less discouraging. With perseverance and the knowledge you will gain from playing the game long enough, you can greatly improve the odds of getting signed.

Your one-stop UK shop for clear, concise explanations to all the important concepts in electronics and tons of direction for building simple, fun electronic projects. The 8 mini-books in this 1 volume include: Getting Started with Electronics Working with Basic Components Working with Integrated Circuits Getting into Alternating Current Working with Radio and Infrared Doing Digital Electronics Working with Basic Stamp Processors Building Special Effects With nearly 900 pages of instruction, Electronics All-in-One For Dummies, UK Edition covers all the bases and provides a fascinating hands-on exploration of electronics.

The research presented in this volume is very recent, and the general approach is that of rethinking popular musicology: its purpose, its aims, and its methods. Contributors to the volume were asked to write something original and, at the same time, to provide an instructive example of a particular way of working and thinking. The essays have been written with a view to helping graduate students with research methodology and the application of relevant theoretical models. The team of contributors is an exceptionally strong one: it contains many of the pre-eminent academic figures involved in popular musicological research, and there is a spread of European, American, Asian, and Australasian scholars. The volume covers seven main themes: Film, Video and Multimedia; Technology and Studio Production; Gender and Sexuality; Identity and Ethnicity; Performance and Gesture; Reception and Scenes and The Music Industry and Globalization. The Ashgate Research Companion is designed to offer scholars and graduate students a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research in a particular area. The companion's editor brings together a team of respected and experienced experts to write chapters on the key issues in their speciality, providing a comprehensive reference to the field.

A young girl listens to her blind grandmother describe how imagination helps her write songs.

"Damage Incorporated" is the first book about the legendary heavy metal band Metallica that provides a detailed exploration of the group’s music and its place within the wider popular music landscape. Written with a broad readership in mind, it offers an interdisciplinary study that incorporates a range of topics which intersect with the band’s music and cultural influence. For students of popular culture, mass media, and music, "Damage Incorporated" will be necessary reading, and sets a new standard for the study and exploration of metal within the field of popular music studies.

Push: Software Design and the Cultural Politics of Music Production shows how changes in the design of music software in the first decades of the twenty-first century shaped the production techniques and performance practices of artists working across media, from hip-hop and electronic dance music to video games and mobile apps. Emerging alongside developments in digital music distribution such as peer-to-peer file sharing and the MP3 format, digital audio workstations like FL Studio and Ableton Live introduced design affordances that encouraged rapid music creation workflows through flashy, user-friendly interfaces. Meanwhile, software such as Avid's Pro Tools attempted to protect its status as the industry standard, professional DAW of choice by incorporating design elements from pre-digital music technologies. Other software, like Cycling 74's Max, asserted its alterity to commercial DAWs by presenting users with nothing but a blank screen. These are more than just aesthetic design choices. Push examines the social, cultural, and political values designed into music software, and how those values become embodied by musical communities through production and performance. It reveals ties between the maximalist design of FL Studio, skeuomorphic design in Pro Tools, and gender inequity in the music products industry. It connects the computational thinking required by Max, as well as iZotope's innovations in artificial intelligence, with the cultural politics of Silicon Valley's design thinking. Finally, it thinks through what happens when software becomes hardware, and users externalize their screens through the use of MIDI controllers, mobile media, and video game controllers. Amidst the perpetual upgrade culture of music technology, Push provides a model for understanding software as a microcosm for the increasing convergence of globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and techno-utopianism that has come to define our digital lives.

This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Drawing together contributions from a wide range of scholars, the book’s four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology.

This reader collects primary documents on the phonograph, cinema, and radio before WWII to show how Americans slowly came to grips with the idea of recorded and mediated sound. Through readings from advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, popular fiction, correspondence, and sheet music, one gains an understanding of how early-20th-century Americans changed from music makers into consumers.

Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sampled, cut, looped and manipulated, thus challenging and complicating the cultural politics of sonic production. Rather than conceiving of music as a representation of fixed cultures, this book engages in a study of music that disrupts the ways in which ethnicity has been written into sound and investigates how transcultural sound practices generate new ways of thinking about culture.