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QUARK STUFF FOR REMIXES, TRANSLATIONS, ETC.:

53-meg zip of Quark 7 file (and ReadMe.txt)
2-meg zip of fonts
85-meg zip of images

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How this book came to be:

Intro by Michael W. Dean

Howdy....

I came up with the idea for this book, Digital Music – DIY Now! in early 2005. I’d just finished writing three books by myself and making two movies and wanted to do something different. I wanted to write another book, not by myself, but with some really smart buddies.

I wrote a proposal, pitched it to my agent, Matt Wagner of Fresh Books, and he secured a publisher, Que. Que is a well known publisher with a lot of decent tech books out, and they get their books into everywhere.

Que liked my idea of writing with several other experts, and I thought I’d enjoy the challenge of working with others. It seemed like a nice change from the isolation of writing a book by myself.

By was I wrong.
It turned out to be a logistical nightmare.

I started with six writers, and one by one, they left the project. One guy was too busy. One guy turned in substandard work, and turned it in late. One guy, a friend of mine of many years, turned in stuff that was WAY too advanced for this book. (He wrote a college level treatise on the advanced physics of sound, tempered with some really groovy LSD-tinged philosophy about the spaces between the waves of the notes. It was fascinating reading, but really didn’t have a place in what I was going for.) I asked him to rewrite it, we argued, he bowed out and stopped speaking to me.

AND THEN THERE WERE THREE…….

It was down to Chris Caulder, Cliff Truesdell and me.

THEN….
The book was finished, in final author review with the copy editors. Then our project editor at Que got downsized, lost his job there, and the book got killed. That happens sometimes. The publisher actually paid us our final little advance, which doesn’t always happen when a book is dropped, and we were free to keep the book and do with it as we pleased. (That doesn’t always happen either.)

Cliff removed his three chapters (Chapter 6 – GarageBand, Chapter 8 – ProTools, Chapter 9 – Reason) and and covered the same material in his very excellent book his very excellent book "Mastering Digital Audio Production: The Professional Music Workflow with Mac OS X "

(You will see some references to those chapters in this book. Ignore them, or simply enjoy them, along with the occasional editor’s comment, as a rare glimpse into the process.)

The eBook you hold in your hands see on your screen is the result. The formatting’s a little quick and dirty. (I’m a writer, not a graphic artist...and the project got dropped just before it went to page layout with the pros at Que.) There are occasional references to the three deleted chapters, and we didn’t renumber to accommodate those missing chapters and a few images that were removed. But it all still works. And the price is right. (And the Quark files are online, and this is a Creative Commons work, if you wanna “remix” it, or just fix it and re-upload it.)

So, for free, you’ve got a damn fine guide to DIY digital audio that slipped between the cracks of commerce in the publishing industry, and we want you to have it.

It runs carbon neutral, and you can zoom in on the images. Try that on a printed book!

The final book was written almost entirely by Chris Caulder and myself. There are a few paragraphs in the book written by Cliff Truesdell, and I left in Cliff’s “Closing Arguments” entry, because it’s great.

And Cliff and I are still friends, and I’m also still friends with Chris Caulder. Chris really kicked ass and came through on this, and was a total trooper about it.

But the whole process was probably three times as much work as it would have been to write a book of this length by myself. Herding cats while they work is harder than work itself.

I will NEVER write another book with anyone else, ever again.

Enjoy!

Michael W. Dean
Los Angeles, July 4, 2007

>>If you’d like to make a donation to the authors, please send via PayPal to 99cent@kittyfeet.com

OUR WONDERFUL WEB HOSTS:

Digital Music - DIY NOW!
TABLE OF CONTENTS

· INTRO

· CHAPTER 1 - A BIT ON SONGWRITING

· CHAPTER 2 - GETTING THE RIGHT STUFF FOR YOUR NEEDS

· CHAPTER 3 - TECHNOLOGY TO USE AND ABUSE (and TAKING IT ON THE ROAD)

· CHAPTER 4 - GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR GEAR (inc. 25 Crucial System Tweaks for Windows)

· CHAPTER 5 - USING ACID TO GET THE JOB DONE

· CHAPTER 6 - GARAGE BAND FOR FUN AND PROFIT (Chapter removed by Cliff)

· CHAPTER 7- FORGING SOUND WITH SOUND FORGE

· CHAPTER 8 - PRO TRICKS WITH PRO TOOLS (Chapter removed by Cliff)

· CHAPTER 9 - THE REASON FOR REASON (Chapter removed by Cliff)

· CHAPTER 10 - BUSINESS BASICS, AND WORKING FROM A BACKPACK, ANYWHERE. (INCLUDING WHAT COUNTRIES ARE FUN FOR EXPATS)

· CHAPTER 11 – SOFT SKILLS TO PAY THE BILLS

· CHAPTER 12 - CLOSING ARGUMENTS

· CHAPTER 13 – INTERVIEWS:

-ROM DI PRISCO
-JOHN DeBORDE
-ANGIE JAY (Ministry)
-ALEXANDER BRANDON
-LESLIE ANN JONES (Skywalker Sound)
-JAMEY SCOTT
-GREG GORDON

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Contact the authors of Digital Music – DIY Now!