Recently I read a lot of books about mixing/mastering etc.. I started this with reading one book of the wellknown series of Paul White – Basic MIDI. This book is well-written and has a logical structure. It’s meant for beginners in MIDI and I guess, this is true. Basic MIDI was not in-depth enough for me, as I have played with several Audio Sequencers the last 2 years. Sometimes it gave me a good overview about stuff I allready knew which actually helped me lots to categorize several components. The book is quite old, but you can read it even when you are not a keyboarder but an synth.musician who is working with f. e. Logic. If you are an GarageBand User you may get an overview too, but lots of the concepts and ideas introduced in this book cannot be done with GarageBand – I switched to Logic Express a while after reading.

Paul White starts with “What is MIDI”, explains a MIDI Sequencer (which is in fact an old Logic Version ), gives an overview about MIDI synchronization and then about synthesis. However the chapter about “practical MIDI editing” is not very useful anymore. Things haven’t changed in the MIDI world, but the tools you work with have. Some stuff is much easier now.

However, this book is recommend for all who need an overview about what is a Sequencer, MIDI, Synthesizer, how to synchronize or connect MIDI devices etc. pp. For beginner this is quite simple, but I recommend to you to play with an tool like GarageBand for a while before reading this introduction. Some terms are much easier to recon if you have done so.
If you have played for 2 years or above, this book will give you nothing new which is no surprise, when reading the books title “Basic Midi”. For at the moment 7 euro it’s a nice to have book. 3 of 5 stars for me

Dear Friends,
when finishing with Thargos, i realized that my only chance to continue my musical work is to learn everything i can get about music theory, means, harmony. I bought several books and wow, there are a lot of quality differences. Some authors think the reader is a stupid idiot, just buying that book for impress (or depress?) his friends. Well, the german book “Harmonielehre und Songwriting” from the authors Fritsch, Kellert and Lonardoni is not like those books. It’s a great and very, very compact reading. On a half page they might explain what the circle of fifths (Quintenzirkel) means. Well, in fact you don’t need any more explaination. What these guys write is straight forward and easy to understand. Just at a few pages there are a lack of words. This is for example when they explain the bass clef; it’s a bit to compact and you have to read carefully to understand that you can combine violine clef and bass clef. A beginner will get out very much out of this book by reading just the first 100 pages and understand, what f. e. a perfect cadence is. I recommend this book to every german speaking musician who wants to learn about harmonies and how you build them up. My only problem is, who should sing that melodies??