Todd M Howard

I bought this one from Amazon for the purpose of improving the quality of my podcast. Garageband, as explained in the book, is a very powerful tool, although not near as powerful as ProTools and other professional software. [As a side note, Garageband is, to the best of my knowledge, still only available for Mac users. (Audacity is a free digital processing software available on the web for PC podcasters)].

This book quickly acclimates the reader to all the different features and tools available in Garageband. And there are hundreds if not thousands of features. This book will not often go beyond the depth of information one could have figured out for oneself while poking around with the software but maybe that’s for the best. It’s a quick, staccato primer for a beginner to get his or her bearings. We all know what happens when we get excited using a powerful new software: we dive in, fumble around, find a few tricks that seem to work and then get stuck for years in a silly rut of inefficiency and limitation. This book will help you avoid that.

One complaint I have with this book and the numerous subsequent works I read was that none of them seemed to give enough attention to the techniques and processes needed to calibrate the gain on one’s microphone and optimize the recording’s signal to noise ratio. It strikes me that this is the foundational problem of any home recording project.… (meer)