The front cover is really nice too...
A short review of “The Composer’s Approach, Volume 1: Principles on room acoustics and basic techniques for digital orchestra” written by Mike Novy.
Earlier this year a post on a few different forums dragged my attention to something I really hadn’t thought of before, the virtual room (or stage). Yes, I have used a few different panning techniques over the years to place my virtual players on my virtual stage. But here was a post on a yet to be released book that would explain this thing called acoustics in great detail.
Not long after it’s release I had a copy and started reading. At first it seemed like a daunting task to get everything “right” but Mike Novy, the author of the book, does a great job explaining everything in a very easy manner. The book has many tables and examples for you to study.
So, what does it explain? What’s the secret? Well, the secret is that there is no secret. Everything is plain physics applied to a digitally created environment, really. In the first half of the book Mike covers room acoustics, localisation, reflections, room depth and so on. The second part shows you how to apply the techniques with the help from various plug-ins and instruments.
Personally I found the first part of the book to be the most interesting of the two. Walkthrough tutorials for different plugins are nice to have but with the knowledge gained in the first part you can easily apply them to your own plugins.
Speaking of plugins, I didn’t like the way the plugins in Logic solved the task so I wrote my own. I’ll see if I can post a link to it later this week.
Conclusion? How does it sound? It takes awhile to transform an old “working” template along the techniques in the book (for me at least, over 80 channels/tracks). But I must say I’m really pleased with the results I’m getting. In really busy passages I feel that each instrument or section has a more airy sound. As if it was more “air” in the room. Hard to describe in words but I trust my ears, it sounds better.
Would I recommend it? Absolutely, if you are a virtual orchestra composer and want more control over how your mockups will sound. For that is really what this book learnt me, to get more control over how it sounds. What you do with that control is up to you.
ISBN: 978-3-8370-8453-5
You can see a small sample of the books content here:
www.the-composers-approach.com
