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As if I'm their target audience. This book has been invaluable in helping me get up and running on Protools. But then, I've always been able to get a lot out of all the.for Dummies books I own.
I read through almost 300 pages of this book, and i still didn't know how to plug in a mic and record a track. To make matters worse, even when you go back and look, in many cases you don't really get the answer you're looking for (namely, how do I do a specific basic task in Pro Tools.).Part of the problem lies with Pro Tools itself, which is too powerful and complicated to be the best choice for most home/project studios. Then a book for dummies should be perfect for me. Way too many incidences of "look at Book X, Chapter Y to learn more." It doesn't even give page numbers.
Too much about how to size track windows and use effects loops, not enough about how to actually plug in a mic, enable it for input, and start recording. Part of it is the number of different hardware choices available, which complicates instruction somewhat. The main problem is that the book is not really an instructional guide for beginners, or really even a comprehensive reference guide (there are very few screen shots or illustrations, for example, and the ones that exist are in many cases grainy, or not well captioned, or all too often, both). No troubleshooting information, either.If you want the right book to get started, try "Pro Tools for Musicians and Songwriters." It's slightly out of date (7.0), but lays out basic concepts and instructions in easy to follow exercises. It is a decent explication of what Pro Tools can do; just not necessarily how to do it.One more problem: this book is simply not written from a pragmatic point of view. Am I stupid.
But really, that shouldn't matter too too much, because the software is very consistently applied. It even provides downloadable loops for use in the exercises. But this one is too sketchy and too poorly organized. So you're in the middle of trying to understand how to do something complicated that you've never done before, in a language that's new to you, and the book sends you off looking for details that you may or may not have remembered from 100 pages ago, without even telling you exactly where to look.
worth every penny for an aspiring musician/music engineer/music producer. a FAT book with tons of information.
Good "bootstrap" overview for beginners. Great manual, easy read, I am just slow to go from analog to digital recording.
I couldn't have asked for a better guide, this program is huge to a beginner like me and this book has been great at helping me to figure it out, bravo again to the dummies series authors and editors.
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