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A close look at the lives of working musicians who aren’t the center of their stage.

Secret (and not-so-secret) weapons, side-of-the-stagers, rhythm and horn sections, backup singers, accompanists—these and other “band people” are the anonymous but irreplaceable character actors of popular music. Through interviews and incisive cultural critique, writer and musician Franz Nicolay provides a portrait of the musical middle class. Artists talk frankly about their careers and attitudes toward their craft, work environment, and group dynamics, and shed light on how support musicians make sense of the weird combination of friend group, gang, small business consortium, long-term creative collaboration, and chosen family that constitutes a band. Is it more important to be a good hang or a virtuoso player? Do bands work best as democracies or autocracies? How do musicians with children balance their personal and professional lives? How much money is too little? And how does it feel to play on hundreds of records, with none released under your name? In exploring these and other questions, Band People gives voice to those who collaborate to create and dissects what it means to be a laborer in the culture industry.

Design Research is an area that is both current and growing, but texts on the subjects are in short supply. This book is a response to the vitality of discussion within journals and at conferences, and it intends to place Design Research in its rightful place at the heart of studio-based education and practice.

Offering a valuable context within which to understand the educational needs and aspirations of the designer, Becoming Designers is also a vital resource for students in this field, whose access to books on the subject is currently very limited.

Becoming a Social Science Researcher is designed to help aspiring social scientists, including credentialed scholars, understand the formidable complexities of the research process. Instead of explaining specific research techniques, it concentrates on the philosophical, sociological, and psychological dimensions of social research. These dimensions have received little coverage in guides written for social science researchers, but they are arguably even more important than particular analytical techniques. Truly sophisticated social science scholarship requires that the researcher understand the intellectual and social contexts in which they collect and interpret information. While social science training in US graduate schools has become more systematic over the past two decades with numerous publications aimed at instruction, training and guidance still fall short in addressing the fundamental needs of this field.