22 Free PDF - Tutorials in A4 and US Letter Format

I've downloaded the zip files, and I'm a little confused. Remember that I'm a professional educator in a previous life, so have experience in writing this kind of thing for students at all levels and ages. You have worked hard on these but have fell into the trap of using examples to explain features, that will add to confusion, not solve it. If you look at the section on compression - you explain the similarity to somebody sitting there with a fader - turning down the loud bits and turning up the quieter ones - but then try to explain the subtle stuff - like knee. You even mention hard knee and soft knee, but after reading it, they may be more confused.

You've also simplified in a way that pays no attention to somebodies age or intelligence. It seems on reading through a few that you are aiming at teenagers who know little physics and are averagely intelligent - but know nothing about the subject. How about a well educated, intelligent person, who would understand more detail? Your coverage of digital conversion is extremely shallow - yet newcomers have to set up devices that want to know about sampling rates, bit depth etc - and what perhaps is the difference between compressed and non compressed formats - they need to know this to set up the kit they bought with their retirement money, or worse, a loan!

Who were you actually aiming it at - in the UK in schools and colleges, we run a system of Levels, with Level one perhaps more suited to people close to being considered having a learning difficulty, and university Higher level study kicking in at Level 4 upwards. Yours seems aimed at Level 2 in the main.

Forums full of people at all these levels often get very grumpy when technical topics are crunched in this way, buy introducing slightly inaccurate statements that serve the user well, until they have grown, and realise what they have taken as gospel, is actually slightly wrong. Analogies that really work, but aren't quite how it is - but accurate enough to promote understanding. It happens when people talk about cables and connecting things up. Things like Watts = Amps X Volts. Everyone uses this, because it's correct in most instances, but has some problems, so the accurate method favoured now is to talk about KVA. Notice how most generators now specify their capability in this way, not Watts. We talk of electrons zipping down a piece of cable at the speed of light, but they actually don't. As you get more experienced, these constants change.

Your work has taken a lot of time and effort, so who is it actually designed for? Each PDF is also quite short - was their a need to keep them as separate documents?

Well done for doing it - but I'm just not sure of your audience?

You've also got some bits totally wrong - Tape saturation, for one. You mention it's created in the console - you missed the point that the recording medium itself, is a magnetic medium (tape) and if you record too hot, you reach the saturation point of the tape, where no more magnetisation can take place. This isn't distortion in the electronic sense, but a particular type of compression. Some tape machines couldn't deal with the over level and they also added their own analogue distortion, but it's also dependent on the bias current that is applied to the tape - and bias current itself is a subject on it's own. Tape saturation plug-ins attempt to recreate this 'swamping' of the recording medium.

You also mangled MIDI - MIDI keyboards connect to other devices with MIDI - which is nothing to do with USB. In fact, a USB connected keyboard doesn't use the MIDI interface at all, just data in a stream that uses the MIDI standard for programme changes and the other stuff. The I stands for interface, and the interface is a 5 pin DIN connector, using in, out and through connections. You don't mention this at all.
 
Last edited:
rob aylestone said:
I've downloaded the zip files, and I'm a little confused. Remember that I'm a professional educator in a previous life, so have experience in writing this kind of thing for students at all levels and ages. You have worked hard on these but have fell into the trap of using examples to explain features, that will add to confusion, not solve it. If you look at the section on compression - you explain the similarity to somebody sitting there with a fader - turning down the loud bits and turning up the quieter ones - but then try to explain the subtle stuff - like knee. You even mention hard knee and soft knee, but after reading it, they may be more confused.

You've also simplified in a way that pays no attention to somebodies age or intelligence. It seems on reading through a few that you are aiming at teenagers who know little physics and are averagely intelligent - but know nothing about the subject. How about a well educated, intelligent person, who would understand more detail? Your coverage of digital conversion is extremely shallow - yet newcomers have to set up devices that want to know about sampling rates, bit depth etc - and what perhaps is the difference between compressed and non compressed formats - they need to know this to set up the kit they bought with their retirement money, or worse, a loan!

Who were you actually aiming it at - in the UK in schools and colleges, we run a system of Levels, with Level one perhaps more suited to people close to being considered having a learning difficulty, and university Higher level study kicking in at Level 4 upwards. Yours seems aimed at Level 2 in the main.

Forums full of people at all these levels often get very grumpy when technical topics are crunched in this way, buy introducing slightly inaccurate statements that serve the user well, until they have grown, and realise what they have taken as gospel, is actually slightly wrong. Analogies that really work, but aren't quite how it is - but accurate enough to promote understanding. It happens when people talk about cables and connecting things up. Things like Watts = Amps X Volts. Everyone uses this, because it's correct in most instances, but has some problems, so the accurate method favoured now is to talk about KVA. Notice how most generators now specify their capability in this way, not Watts. We talk of electrons zipping down a piece of cable at the speed of light, but they actually don't. As you get more experienced, these constants change.

Your work has taken a lot of time and effort, so who is it actually designed for? Each PDF is also quite short - was their a need to keep them as separate documents?

Well done for doing it - but I'm just not sure of your audience?

You've also got some bits totally wrong - Tape saturation, for one. You mention it's created in the console - you missed the point that the recording medium itself, is a magnetic medium (tape) and if you record too hot, you reach the saturation point of the tape, where no more magnetisation can take place. This isn't distortion in the electronic sense, but a particular type of compression. Some tape machines couldn't deal with the over level and they also added their own analogue distortion, but it's also dependent on the bias current that is applied to the tape - and bias current itself is a subject on it's own. Tape saturation plug-ins attempt to recreate this 'swamping' of the recording medium.

You also mangled MIDI - MIDI keyboards connect to other devices with MIDI - which is nothing to do with USB. In fact, a USB connected keyboard doesn't use the MIDI interface at all, just data in a stream that uses the MIDI standard for programme changes and the other stuff. The I stands for interface, and the interface is a 5 pin DIN connector, using in, out and through connections. You don't mention this at all.
Click to expand...

Hello there Rob and thank you for taking the time to respond :)

Well my message is not going to be as long as yours not because I am bored to type cause I can give you an answer
that will respond to most of your questions :)

I agree that I skip some really technical stuff, like MIDI and stuff I do yes.
I am not really aiming to a specific level of people, I don;t really like doing that.

I just try to keep it as simple as possible, not because I think people can't handle the information :)
The reason I do this is because this type of info doesn't really concern me.

I am a music producer (basically composing video game soundtracks), but also too "afraid" to publish some of my songs
cause I think most of them suck and I won't publish unless I think it's good(but that's a totally different and personal story).... That's why I spend more time as a mixing engineer rather than a composer. Hope that will change in the near future.

I don't really care about electricity watts and stuff... I just want to know how I can get where I want to with the fastest way possible.

If I can compose music with 1,2,3 steps then so be it.. I will never spend time on watts and stuff unless it's so crucial that will harm an analog device
or I will NEED to know it in order for my gear to work.

If I am not gonna burn/destroy something then the really technical stuff for me are not so important. I prefer to spend time improving myself on the mix itself
and the compositions.

Having said that, I repeat that I do not aim to levels of people. I just discard the really technical details.

I find them that they are useful only if you want to create your own plugins or analog device ... etc

My thought might be wrong, some people will want the technical details, some people want to focus on the things that matter... creating music.
So that's my train of thought when I create my tuts.

Of course I still things to learn, mixing is an art you ll never stop learning, but I hope I do good :)

Thanks for your response again and let me know if you have any more questions!
 
Paschalis, I would like to take this train to mention something that I noticed myself. While you say that you have a lot to learn (everybody has) I feel that you are in a too much more advanced point than I am. If I already learn how to 'read' my monitors and know how they should sound in order to have a mix that I can call a mix, all these plugins and processors are still a mistery for me. Compressors, reverbers, delays... wow, what a bunch of black boxes!

Anyway, reading your tutorials I confess that I feel a bit frustrated by the end of the three ones that more interested me at this time: reverbers, compressors and saturations. I read avidly your texts awaiting for the part that you would start to give some examples on how to use them or give some cool tips for the absolute begginers like me and then suddenly the tutorials ended when I was just getting excited.

It is not critics just a constructive comment.

:)
 
rob aylestone said:
Your work has taken a lot of time and effort, so who is it actually designed for? Each PDF is also quite short - was their a need to keep them as separate documents?

Well done for doing it - but I'm just not sure of your audience?

You've also got some bits totally wrong - Tape saturation, for one. You mention it's created in the console - you missed the point that the recording medium itself, is a magnetic medium (tape) and if you record too hot, you reach the saturation point of the tape, where no more magnetisation can take place. This isn't distortion in the electronic sense, but a particular type of compression. Some tape machines couldn't deal with the over level and they also added their own analogue distortion, but it's also dependent on the bias current that is applied to the tape - and bias current itself is a subject on it's own. Tape saturation plug-ins attempt to recreate this 'swamping' of the recording medium.
Click to expand...

Oops forgot about this sorry!

The pdfs are short cause I've written them in different days, cause they follow by blog's structure. Nothing scheduled just trying to post things that matter (at least for me).
I have lots to post yet!

You're right about the tape saturation but as you might have read, I 've talked about tape solutions to a totally digital recording.
It would have no use to tell people to be careful during the recording phase for saturation effects in a 100% digital recording. :)
 
YanKleber said:
Paschalis, I would like to take this train to mention something that I noticed myself. While you say that you have a lot to learn (everybody has) I feel that you are in a too much more advanced point than I am. If I already learn how to 'read' my monitors and know how they should sound in order to have a mix that I can call a mix, all these plugins and processors are still a mistery for me. Compressors, reverbers, delays... wow, what a bunch of black boxes!

Anyway, reading your tutorials I confess that I feel a bit frustrated by the end of the three ones that more interested me at this time: reverbers, compressors and saturations. I read avidly your texts awaiting for the part that you would start to give some examples on how to use them or give some cool tips for the absolute begginers like me and then suddenly the tutorials ended when I was just getting excited.

It is not critics just a constructive comment.

:)
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot for your comment!

I always update the tutorials with new stuff and also keep a live record of the updates for my readers.
You're so right about this though.

I was also planning to update the posts with video tutorials too and got overwhelmed with the topics that I kept posting new content postponing about the videos that needed to be posted.
I've also spent time to mix projects for my clients and forgot about them damn...

It wasn't only a constructive comment it was a great reminder too, thanks !
 
Thank you for being so gentle, Paschalis. Sometimes I feel an ass by complaining about a thing that someone has made for free in the spare time and just gave away. However being a teacher myself (retired) I know how frustrating can be when our message doesn't get properly the audience. I think that worse than get a critic that may help ourselves to enhance our work is to figure out too late that the educacional stuff that you prepared actually didn't hit the objective.

All in all your work is nice and I appreciate your will on share your knowledge. It is just that some of us wants more, moooooore, MOOOOOOOOOORE!!!!

:D
 
YanKleber said:
Thank you for being so gentle, Paschalis. Sometimes I feel an ass by complaining about a thing that someone has made for free in the spare time and just gave away. However being a teacher myself (retired) I know how frustrating can be when our message doesn't get properly the audience. I think that worse than get a critic that may help ourselves to enhance our work is to figure out too late that the educacional stuff that you prepared actually didn't hit the objective.

All in all your work is nice and I appreciate your will on share your knowledge. It is just that some of us wants more, moooooore, MOOOOOOOOOORE!!!!

:D
Click to expand...

Nah ... even if it's something free it's good to know that there are some people out there having the guts to say "thanks for free stuff but you can do it even better".

If the creator of the free stuff gets offended, then that means the his purpose was never to give something out for free.
Since you wanted (the creator) to help out people then you must be more than happy to get comments about how you can make even better the free stuff.

So rest assured that the last thing on earth that I would think of is that you're an ass. It's just never gonna happen.

And prepare for MOAR! these PDFs are only the beginning :D
 
YanKleber said:
You welcome. I just hate to see how people are freaking out nowadays about files just because there is a bunch of bitches writing unresponsible articles to terrify computer users. Actually most of people thinks that a computer virus is like a real virus and that it has self-life and do things by itself. A computer virus is a program. Just like your text editor, your spreadsheet and your DAW. And as any computer program it won't make anything unless you run it. And how do you run a computer program? By double clicking the EXE file. A computer program within a ZIP file cannot run itself just because you downloaded the ZIP or opened it.

I remember that in the past some applications such as WinRar and WinZip had an option that could convert your ZIP file into an EXE file. I don't know if they still has such option. The reason was to make the files self-extractable because if you didn't have the WinRar or WinZip application you wouldn't be able to extract the contents. But it was several years ago. Then there were some guys that put EXE files telling that they were self-extractable zipped files. I think that it was what caused to create this belief that ZIP files may be nasty. LoL!

Nonetheless I still think that have AV is a very good practice. I absolutely do NOT recommend no one avoid it.

One more thing about plagues... people are sooooo freak about virus but the truth is that nowadays virus are the lesser nasty stuff out there. If you are a careful computer user -- and by 'careful' I mean not double click EXE files that you don't trust -- you rarely will be infected by a virus. The real danger comes from hackers and robots that exploits your operating system weakness while you are navigating in the web. Once you get connected you may have someone attacking and trying to invade your computer either to transform it on a zumbi machine to integrate a big attack or to look inside your stuff and steal your passwords, banking and credit card credentials etc. The same happens with stuff we download online and install without care just to get unauthorized applications installed together that keep sucking your information and doing only God knows what without you have a clue about this.

Just navigating around sites, you may get 'infected' by stuff that aren't properly virus but that potentially can be very harmful. Normaly the virus have the objective to infect and destroy your computer contents or annoy you by preventing you of perform certain tasks, righ? OK, virus are very obvious so mostly of time when you get infected by one you practically can notice it imediately. What about a silent thing that passes through your defenses, installs secretely in your computer and keeps there transmiting your personal data to someone else in the other side of the world? Yeah, it happens all the time and it is done normally by Javascript, PHP and ASP pages. And you don't know that it is happening! Scary, uh?

Anyway, for all that are freaks about virus I would advice to calm down and take a look about such real security issues. Do you have a firewall installed in your computer? No? Well, I bet that it maybe be being a nice playground for hackers then. Did you ran lately an anti-spyware scan on your computer? What? You don't even know what is that? Man... if you use your computer to access your bank and shop online you may have been phished already.

OK, here it goes my checklist to be safe:

  1. Don't be silly. Don't fear files. Instead assume your responsability and learn what you are doing.
  2. Install a free AV (Avira, Avast, etc, are OK) -- yeah, you don't need the paid stuff
  3. Install the free version of a firewall to protect you against hackers -- ZoneAlarm is awesome. Again, you don't need the paid stuff.
  4. Download and install Spybot Search&Destroy on your computer. It is free. Make a full scan. I don't want to scare you but you but get prepared to the long list of scam and phishing stuff that it will find on your computer. Such things comes to your computer through your daily navigation. Instead you can look for any other anti-spyware program, but as far as I know Spybot Search&Destroy is the better out there.
  5. Don't believe in 'trusted' sources and 'untrusted' sources. I already catched virus in disks and pendrives from friends that could swear they were clean, and I already downloaded tons of online stuff that were completly fine.
  6. Learn this for life: virus are programs. Programs are EXE files. Don't double click EXE files unless you have an AV installed.
  7. Never click links on email messages that you don't know what is this.
  8. Run your anti-spyware regularly to check your system, say once each 15 days.
  9. Keep your AV and firewall up to date. Mostly of them update themselves automatically or will warn you when you need to take an action for update.
  10. Free versions of Antivirus and Firewall will try to scare you after a while telling some kind of BS that the paid version will protect you better. Just ignore such reminders. You will be fine with the free stuff.

:)

Doing this you should be fine. That's what I have been doing my whole life as a computer user.
Click to expand...

I was just randomly lurking and I find this posts very usefull, thanks to both of u!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top