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Resources

Books

The following books are highly recommended. Wherever possible, each title is a dual-purpose link to the product on Amazon if you want more details. HOVER the mouse pointer over the link to pop up a thumbnail of the book (this may not work on Chrome); CLICK the link to go to the product page on Amazon.

Press Backspace or your browser's Back button to return to this list when you're done shopping on Amazon.

The Computer Music Tutorial (Curtis Roads) This is the definitive encyclopaedia of all things related to computer music, including algorithms, history of synthesis, techniques of synthesis, and much, much more. It's a complete and detailed survey of the entire field (not really a tutorial at all).

Microsound (Curtis Roads) This book is a detailed exploration of Roads' research into granular synthesis and a dozen related sub-fields. It's not an overview. Recommended for people seriously interested in the subtleties of granular synthesis.

The Csound Book (Richard Boulanger, ed.) Csound is a programming language for synthesizing audio waveforms, developed by Barry Vercoe. This book is a collection of instructional papers on using Csound, from a variety of experts. Recommended for people who want to get deep into the algorithmic creation of sound or audio experiments. Even if you're not actually using Csound, this book can provide a broad perspective on what Csound is used for, and what's involved in software-synthesis at the bottom level.

Audio Postproduction for Film and Video (Jay Rose) Includes a CD of examples. This book is an excellent introduction to the issues involved in preparing the soundtrack for a movie. It's not especially focused on DV, but comes from a solid background in audio for film production. The emphasis is on post-production, not on studio or location recording.

Film Directing Shot by Shot (Steven Katz) One of the standards in film schools, its relevance to sound design is indirect, but significant. Composers of symphonies and concertos build their works around a framework of themes, and film scores (or ambience stems) have an equally important underlying structure. Even if one is composing pure sonic art, an understanding of how space and POV and timing are handled in film can be surprisingly valuable.

The Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound, Third Edition (David Yewdall) Sound in film can be more complex to edit and prepare than the film itself. We hear around corners (the camera doesn't), and we "read" a cut in sound as a location change (the camera doesn't). The sound within a scene is a fluid thing which substantially defines the reality of the multiple shots within that scene, from roomtone and ambience to foley and sound fx.

SoftSynths & Other Software

Absynth 4 (Native Instruments) Absynth (now in version 5, which for some reason seems to be unavailable on Amazon) is the sound designer's ultimate tool for exploring and manipulating far-out sounds. Although it has stunning musical capabilities, its real strengths are in unlimited creativity and originality in sculpting and crafting original timbres with real depth and almost unlimited mod and control capabilities. There's something about Absynth's wonderfully unique and quirky interface that lures the user into unexpected experiments and mind-bending tonalities.

REAKTOR 5 (Native Instruments) The ultimate synthesizer of synthesizers, Reaktor is an advanced digital signal processing laboratory with a slick, drag-to-connect graphical interface. Although its capabilities are astoundingly advanced and exhaustive, it's also easy to build your own basic synthesizers from scratch, and it comes with an unusually creative set of pre-defined synths to play immediately, without any design work required. This software is truly a masterpiece.

Omnisphere (Spectrasonics) Omnisphere is the gigantic spawn of Atmosphere, but Omnisphere is a true power synth with some unprecedented capabilities and a vast library of sounds and presets. Although Omni is one of the most powerful soft-synths available (if not the most), it is also inexcusably easy to use. The sound quality and the depth of samples and multisamples are absolutely top quality.

Hardware

KORE 2 (Native Instruments) The ultimate soft-synth controller for nearly all VST plugins. This compact keyboard-top controller provides powerful performance access to the KORE application running on your computer. With KORE you can create innumerable "meta-presets" comprising multiple layers of soft synths with elaborate routing through multiple FX and signal processors.