Chapter 12 Further Reading — Recording Instruments

A short, honest shelf. Everything here is real and worth your time; nothing is required before recording your instrument layers. URLs are given at the domain level only — sites reorganize, search functions don't.

Beginner

  • Appendix C: Microphone Selection Guide and Appendix D: Studio Setups by Budget (this book). When a second mic or a DI box becomes the genuine next purchase, Appendix C translates this chapter's source-by-source needs into classes and price tiers, and Appendix D shows where instrument-recording gear sits inside a whole rig at each budget. Read them after the Field Guide table, not instead of it.
  • Bruce Bartlett and Jenny Bartlett, Practical Recording Techniques (Focal Press). The friendly long-running introduction; its instrument-by-instrument placement chapters reinforce this one with additional recipes for guitar, bass, drums, and piano. Any recent edition serves.
  • Shure's educational articles (shure.com — the educational/publications section). Manufacturer content, but their explainers on micing guitar amps, acoustic instruments, and drum kits are solid, free, and honest about the physics. Read for mechanisms, not model numbers — the way this chapter taught you.

Intermediate

  • Mike Senior, Recording Secrets for the Small Studio (Focal Press). Written for exactly your situation — small rooms, one or two mics, modest interfaces — with placement-over-purchase pragmatism on every source this chapter covered, including honest minimal-mic drum strategies. The natural next book after this chapter.
  • Bobby Owsinski, The Recording Engineer's Handbook (multiple editions). Source-by-source technique surveys drawn from working engineers who frequently disagree with each other — which is the point. Reading three professionals argue about bass capture will inoculate you against anyone claiming there's one right answer.
  • Glyn Johns, Sound Man (Blue Rider Press, 2014). The memoir behind case study 1: Zeppelin, the Stones, the Beatles' "Get Back" sessions, the Eagles, told by the engineer at the desk. Light on technical recipes, rich in the philosophy this chapter called the stairwell mind — and a portrait of what committed-balance recording demanded of everyone in the room.
  • Sound On Sound magazine (soundonsound.com). Decades of freely searchable technique features; start with searches for "recording electric guitar," "recording acoustic guitar," and "recording drums," and note how often the professionals' first move is placement, not purchase.

Advanced

  • Alexander U. Case, Sound FX: Unlocking the Creative Potential of Recording Studio Effects (Focal Press). The deepest readable treatment of what this chapter could only sketch: delay, comb filtering, and phase interaction with actual math, plus how those mechanisms become flangers, phasers, and spatial effects. The silent killer, fully autopsied.
  • John Eargle, The Microphone Book (Focal Press). The standard serious reference on transducers, patterns, and stereo technique theory — the rigorous underpinnings of every placement decision in this chapter, including why cones and soundholes radiate the way they do.
  • Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles (Curvebender Publishing). An exhaustive, lovingly documented study of how the minimal-mic era actually worked at Abbey Road — every console, mic, and technique. Expensive and worth hunting through a library; it's the receipts behind "minimal micing is the original, not the budget version."
  • Audio Engineering Society (aes.org). Conference papers on stereo technique, microphone arrays, and interference effects, for when curiosity turns professional. Student memberships are worth it for the archive access alone.

For Educators

  • Run the flip test as a lab station. Exercises C1 and C2 (the comb factory and the reflex drill) work with one DAW workstation per group and produce dramatic, audible results in minutes; a blind class vote on "fuller versus thinner" turns phase from a diagram into an experience. Follow with C7's string-law scale model using a speaker and two phones' worth of capture.
  • Case study 1 as a discussion text. Pair the Glyn Johns reading with a listening session — "Good Times Bad Times" against any modern hyper-separated kit — and debate commitment versus flexibility: what does each approach assume about the musician, and who carries responsibility for balance? The question generalizes to every committed decision in production.
  • The companion volume, The Physics of Music, covers the science under this chapter's engineering — timbre and Fourier analysis (its Chapter 7) and room acoustics (its Chapter 34) — useful for courses pairing studio practice with science credit.
  • Assign the quiz's applied scenario (question 25) as a group project. Teams design the 2-input weekend plan, then defend the schedule, phase checks, and bleed decisions to the class; grading rewards named tradeoffs rather than "correct" answers, which is the chapter's actual lesson.