Jarrod Iaria

This book is more of a resource, covering the fundamentals of a wide range of concepts in sound design all at different levels and not necessarily a book that introduces the fundamental technical and creative concepts for a beginner.

I purchased this as part of a humble-books bundle and thought it could be a good way of brushing up on concepts and filling in any gaps in my knowledge.

The content is great but way more technically minded than you'd expect, and whilst there's definitely a lot of creative techniques to extrapolate from the chapters, don't expect anything really in the way of high-level creative concepts and approaches. 

I'd highly recommend it however as a companion technical resource to something like David Sonnenschein's ‘Sound Design' for beginners (which is geared entirely towards the creative techniques side of things), whilst more experienced sound designers or those entering the field from another area in audio production will get a lot keeping this around if they ever need to brush up on any area of the craft.

Also, side-note, Chapter 7: Designing Sound for 3D Films is strange in that it frames what it's really about (surround sound, object based formats, and use of panning in these setups) mostly around how it relates to 3D movies. This is a recent book, and the decision to focus on 3D - which has mostly been an abandoned novelty since the mid 2010s - is really baffling and potentially confusing for newcomers, who might find the use of the terms 2D and 3D sound, and 2D and 3D films in relation to each other confusing and potentially limiting.

It probably would have been a better idea to leave the discussion of the potential uses and challenges of sound design for 3D films to a separate chapter (it's still definitely a worthwhile topic), and introduce surround sound on its own in the context of its more common usage (which is 2D films lmao). It might have even been a good idea to take this a step further and separate object-based formats into their own chapter, maybe contextualising that in terms of VR films or a brief discussion on video-games as I think that would provide a stronger point of reference for the difference between channel and object-based audio.

idk man there's some genuinely good advice and ideas in here but every time you hit gold while reading Steven goes on some weird tangent about masturbation and pseudo-sociology/psychology/spirituality.

could've been a decent guide to combatting creative problems if Pressfield would just shut the fuck and stop imparting ill-informed world-view and his misconstrued understanding of literally any other topic as fact