Magazines - Are they worth it?
So, as the title says, are there any worth investing in?
Right now I’m looking into:
Computer Music Magazine
Future Music Magazine
Both seem to have decent production value, and I was just wondering if there were any others that people swear by. For DJing or Production.
A lot of these magazines post similar or the exact same information on the site as they do in the magazine. It’s worth it if you want every little detail about a product, but if you just want the good stuff, they want to draw people in with the site, so it’s probably on the site.
computer magazine is pretty good and if you got the change go buy it
allways comes with a free cd of like 7gb of samples or vsts and stuff so its worth the money
I buy Computer Music occasionally, as I have to flick through it to see if this months content is worth my £10. I find that it’s hit and miss with what I want from it (mostly Ableton stuff), but as mentioned before, the bundled DVD is always quite good. It gives you around a GB of samples dependant on the months theme, some trial software, some free software and a little section called “CM Studio” which is full of handy little plugins for your DAW.
Both are great magazines!
I found both useful, especially their little tutorials. The special on Ableton and Reason have really helped me too.
they’re only putting that on there so you think it’s legal. its basically stating that they dont host any of the files themselves, and if there’s a copyright ownership claim they’ll take the links down.
its the same legal grey area of all the music blog sites out there.
(don’t be surprised if the mods remove the link eventually)
they are okay, but a lot of the tips they give you is redundant as in repeated over and over, plus they dont really get into details into why they do things in the tutorial
i used to collect them, buying every single issue as i wanted to “build a collection” (heh!) before finding out they cover the same thing again and again most of the time, its good to keep up to date with what’s hot and what’s new though
They are not exactly cheap as well, over the time i have probably spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on these magazines (computer music, music tech focus, future music etc) each of these cost SGD $25+ over here (about USD $20, expensive no? must be all the importing) and the freebies they give out is almost always not so good, once in awhile they give out something nice but a lot of the times not really
a lot of the stuff they cover can be found on youtube or some personal websites found on google
so yeah if you got the extra money they do give some nice tips every now and then, but i actually much prefer video tutorials to follow on (eg sonic academy, great video tutorials!)
All the computer music mags with masterclasses are effin awesome - learnt soooo much watching those videos !
This about sums it up I think.
Yeah I’ve been watching a fair few of those when I can find them on youtube. Figure the magazine subscription for the masterclasses alone is pretty much worth it.
And one thing to consider as well, if you get a subscription, it’s MUCH cheaper than just the cover price.
Going to pull the trigger on Computer Music Mag fairly soon. Still on the edge about Future Music, might pick up a couple single ones before I decide to get that in addition to CMM.
I have a subscription to Computer Music and I love it. Not only does it provide indepth info on genre specific tricks, it has music theory (which I know nothing about). The tutorials are good too. One thing that has been brought up is things are repeated. I tracked down Computer Music Special 42 - Make Dance Music. The section on house is identical to Computer Music 144 - The Essential Guide to House music.
Best thing about physical magazines instead of website articles and questionable PDFs:
reading on the toilet
Lol guess what book I keep in my toilet
“Reason 5 power!” , great read!
add mixmag, djmag and remix to that list also…
Ive subscribed to computer music for a good few years and future music for this year and agree with most of the comments on here…
Both great mags on the whoile - the videos in CM are awesome and sometimes you get some killer software and stuff to bolster your sample library.
I have to say that after a few years of CM Im getting a bit tired of the format / info. It does start to repeat. But if you haven’t ever bought it before then its 100% worthwhile.
Future music seems to have more interviews with producers rather than just tutorials which is keeping it fresher for me…