GET SMART

Mar 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Marty Cutler

BERKLEE PRESS

In their new book, Finale: An Easy Guide to Music Notation ($59.95), Thomas E. Rudolph and Vincent A. Leonard Jr. give instruction for novice and advanced users of Finale on Mac and Windows platforms. The authors guide you through the intricacies of creating publisher-quality notation while writing your own music.

The accompanying CD-ROM gives you hundreds of files based on exercises in the book. A collection of templates includes files for choir, marching band, and orchestra, as well as single-line and grand staff templates. You also receive three libraries of articulation and dynamic markings, and General MIDI instrument libraries prepared for each template. Berklee Press; tel. (617) 747-2146; Web www.berkleepress.com.

BIG METEOR PUBLISHING

The third edition of The Indie Bible ($25.95) adds 33 articles written by independent-music authorities to Big Meteor's compendium of resources for the independent musician. The new section offers topics including songwriting, joining a songwriting association, copyrighting, finding a new band member, getting airplay, and more.

The book provides contacts for mainstream reviewers of different music genres and then names genre-specific reviewers. Section two lists radio stations that play indie music and offers stations that cater to specific styles.

Other sections include services that help sell and promote music, sites that accommodate uploading of music and video files, and free resources for music promotion. AMSCO Publications/Music Sales Corp. (distributor); tel. (212) 254-2100; Web www.indiecontactbible.com.

MIT PRESS

Articles that survey methods for the electronic distribution of musical scores are compiled in The Virtual Score ($28), edited by Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. The book provides information about computer applications with a focus on the Internet.

The first part of the book deals with musical representation and interchange, discussing early music and scores in Braille, the Guido format (named after music theorist Guido d'Arezzo), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and recent methods for presenting and distributing online scores.

Section two talks about retrieving and analyzing data from encoded melodies. The last section looks at image processing, which can restore and archive lost features from music prints and manuscripts. MIT Press; tel. (800) 356-0343 or (617) 253-5646; e-mail mitpress-orders@mit.edu; Web http://mitpress.mit.edu.

FOCAL PRESS

Glenn Ballou's Handbook for Sound Engineers ($120.99) is in its third edition. The book offers updates that cover new developments in the audio field. Guest experts include Ken Pohlmann and David Miles Huber.

Topics include virtual systems and digital interfacing by Ray Rayburn and computer-aided sound-system design and concert-hall acoustics by Dr. Wolfgang Ahnert. Ballou offers sections about interpretation systems, intercoms, assistive listening, and image projection. Handbook for Sound Engineers covers evergreen topics such as grounding, loudspeaker and enclosure building, and sound-system design as well as digital signal processing (DSP), modeling and auralization, DVD, and new developments in MIDI. Focal Press (Butterworth Heinemann); tel. (781) 904-2500; e-mail marketing@focalpress.com; Web www.focalpress.com.