As you learn about recording techniques for music, it’s wise to remember that music is a wonderful reason for recording.

Music can be exalting, exciting, soothing, sensuous, and fulfilling. It’s marvelous that recordings can preserve it. As a recording engineer or recording musician, it’s to your advantage to better understand what music is all about.

Music starts as musical ideas or feelings in the mind and heart of its composer. Musical instruments are used to translate these ideas and feelings into sound waves. Somehow, the emotion contained in the music—the message—is coded in the vibrations of air molecules. Those sounds are converted to electricity and stored magnetically or optically. The composer’s message ...

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