My New Book

My book on homerecording has finally appeared!

Here's what it looks like:


It's a book for beginners, mostly. I suppose most of you are beyond that point. Plus, as you may have anticipated, given my location, the book is in German.

Here's the publisher's webpage: http://www.gccarstensen.com/html/fact18.html

Anyway, it feels pretty good to finally be done with it. :green: A book is a lot of work, I tell ya! A lot more than the actual writing of ... lemme see ... 237 pages.

congrats! when will we see the english translation?

Thanks, Rochey! I don't think there'll be an English translation. Maybe if it sells really, really well. But I suppose there are already various English books on the subject written by native speakers.

How does one determine that "Homerecording Guide" requires a masculine article?

I see that Aufzeichnung (recording) is feminine; but "magnetic recording technique", the wonderfully Germanic "Magnetaufzeichnungsverfahren" is neuter. Of course we don't want to limit things to magnetic media, so I guess the construction would be "das Heimaufzeichnungverfahren"?

Ah...but the book is a guide, for which "Homerecording" is an adjective. So "der" would apply as the masculine article for Guide. Which is your subtitle's "Ratgeber" :grin:

Glad that sorted out! And I think the hybrid English-ish title is more felicitous than

der Heimaufzeichnungverfahrener Ratgeber (?) Or would one perhaps use Anleitung if it were a complete concatenation, hence

die Heimaufzeichnunganleitung ? Technique being assumed...

Oh, by the way, congratulations! :thumb: I hope it sells like proverbial hotcakes.

From tourism it is common to say "Der Guide"
"Guide" is around for a longer time now.

[quote author="DerEber"]From tourism it is common to say "Der Guide"
"Guide" is around for a longer time now.[/quote]

It figures that we lazy Americans get things moved in that direction :razz:

However, I guess this site is trying to stick to tradition:

http://www.dict.cc/?s=guide&pagenum=1

[quote author="DerEber"]From tourism it is common to say "Der Guide"
"Guide" is around for a longer time now.[/quote]

I guess that's because the German word would be "Führer", which has obvious historical connotations. :roll:

[quote author="bcarso"]How does one determine that "Homerecording Guide" requires a masculine article?

[...]

And I think the hybrid English-ish title is more felicitous than

der Heimaufzeichnungverfahrener Ratgeber (?) Or would one perhaps use Anleitung if it were a complete concatenation, hence

die Heimaufzeichnunganleitung ? Technique being assumed...

Oh, by the way, congratulations! :thumb: I hope it sells like proverbial hotcakes.[/quote]

Thanks Brad!

Yeah, German gets more and more anglicized. "Homerecording" is a common term in German these days as is "guide." I didn't pick the title, btw. But it's hard to come up with anything much better. "Heimauzeichnungsanleitung" or perhaps "Anleitung zur heimischen Tonaufzeichnung" would sound like pre-war literature and would have to be printed in Gothic type. :grin:

Something like this:



BTW: What's interesting about Gothic type is that people tend to think of it as Teutonic and, well, "Nazi". So did the Nazis themselves ... until they found out that its inventor was in fact Jewish. D'oh! So in 1942 they urged all newspapers to drop what they now called "schwabacher Judenletter" and use "deutsche Normalschrift" instead, which was a (pretty crude) sans serif font.

Anyway, the rule of thumb is to use the article that you would use for the German equivalent. But then again there are no real equivalents in languages. Also sometimes the sound of the word suggests a different gender. In the case of guide the closest translation would probably be "Führer", so it's masculine. Of course if you think of "Anleitung" it should be feminine, but the sound of the word is rather masculine, I'd say, the e being silent.

congrats.

JR

[quote author="Rossi"]I guess that's because the German word would be "Führer", which has obvious historical connotations. :roll:[/quote]
That's a fact...
... in the past though many happy family holidays have resulted from selecting a campsite from the ADAC Campingführer and I say the relation to that topic or word is at least as 'tricky' as a book about recording :roll: :wink:

Happy sales BTW :thumb:

[quote author="Rossi"]
BTW: What's interesting about Gothic type is that people tend to think of it as Teutonic and, well, "Nazi".[/quote]

When I studied German about 40 years ago the teachers all referred to that font as Fraktur. I particularly liked the lower case symbol for double s. But then that's ss, which gets us back into the nasty business of WWII etc. associations again...

http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/fraktur.htm

When "our" Dept. of Homeland Security was launched there was a lot of tongue-clucking too.

But back to audio: I wonder what the comparable titles in English are. I've seen a few but don't know them intimately, particularly any with the "home" emphasis. There's Bob Katz's on mastering (ISBN 0240808371), and there's another I can see the cover of in mind's eye (a console figures prominently) but don't recall the title. Ahh---a search reveals it is probably the Bruce Bartlett book, Practical Recording Techniques. Looks like I'm recalling a cover from an earlier edition though.

Actually a search just with the word "recording" in the title field on bookfinder yields quite a number of titles (plus a bunch unrelated to this subject). I see there is even a title in the "for dummies" series.

Search with "home recording" yields quite a few titles too. There's an intriguing one from a Dave Simons: Analog Recording: Using Vintage Gear in Home Studios (ISBN 0879308648).

Brad...






















...You need to get out more!

:green:

-Congrats, Rossi! -Keep a copy or six for the Grandchildren! :thumb:

Keith

Actually I'm thinking about going to a concert tonight... :green:

[quote author="kubi"]Funny to see that people discuss more the title than the actual content of the book.
[/quote]
Sorry to have started that, but on the other hand I don't have access to any of the content yet.

I suspect your young people/coolness hypothesis is correct. And as Andreas points out, he didn't pick the title.

Well, rules on compounding of foreign words aren't quite as fixed. I frequently have to deal with stuff like that in my articles, as a lot of English language words in today's recording lingo. Its considered bad style in German to repeat the same word all over again, so for instance it's not uncommon to alternate between the German word and the English expression (e.g. Vorverstärker and Preamp). Then there are inevitably cases in which you feel compelled to use a compound of English and German words. For instance Gain-Regler. There are few fixed rules for that. Usually you use a hyphen, but some English terms are so common, you often see them used in real compounds without hyphens. When it comes to all-English expressions you usually go with the English spelling, i.e. home recording. But since we're in Germany we tend to capitalize nouns, even if they're foreign words. In a title, of course, it would be capitalized even in the original language.

I suggested the translation "Führer" (not "Ratgeber") because my book is kinda workshoppy. It doesn't have this encyclopedic approach that most German books seem to have. You can even see it in the table of contents: the stucture is pretty flat, there are no sub-sub-sub-sub-chapters. For the most part it goes from A to B to C etc, i.e. it guides you through the whole process from choosing the right gear for your purposes to hooking up the stuff to recording, mixing & mastering your songs. It ends with burning your CD (or, if that's too old school, compressing your tracks to mp3 files). So, even if I didn't pick the title, it's actually pretty appropriate.

Yeah well, it's simply not done that way. And frankly, it looks plain wrong to me. If you published a book entitled "Der Homerecordingguide" people would be irritated. There are still many cases where the Duden just doesn't follow common usage. And ultimately usage is what counts. Just use google for "Desktoppublishing" on websites in German - there are hardly any entries but zillions for "Desktop Publishing" . So the question is, who's wrong? Duden or everybody else?

[quote author="SSLtech"]Brad...


...You need to get out more!

:green:

Keith[/quote]

The concert was spectacularly good, if you like baroque music, and I had a great seat. I thought initially it was a bit too close-in, but it proved perfect for the acoustic in Royce Hall and the distribution of the players on stage. Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin. Fabulous control of dynamics and tempi, outstanding soloists, some repetoire I'd never heard (composers Erlebach and Graun) along with old favorites Vivaldi RV 156, the popular Marcello oboe concerto played as well as I've ever heard, and on a baroque oboe at that, and the J S Bach harpsichord concerto that never gets old for me, the d minor BWV 1052. The group did two encores after we simply wouldn't let them go, starting with a hilarious "Bach-influenced" piece that turned out to be Strangers in the Night :grin:

Catch them if you can.

Ober-Schlaumeier. . .
gut one!

Do you use die Sprechmuschel or der Microfon in the text?