An audio engineer, who is a buddy of mine made me a proposal that no aspiring musician can say no to.. “Come to my recording studio and make a record,” he said. “We can work on it up to the point that you find it acceptable. Take all the studio time you need.” In return, we decided that after I printed the record, I’d give him a part of the sales. This gift was a result of friendship and at the same time a desire for more experience.
So for a couple of days at a time, every month or so, I’d drive two hours to his studio, sleep there nights in a bed he’d set up, and record during the day. In fact, I ended up composing most of the record in the course of off times in the studio. While recording I paid attention on how he arranged the microphones and played around with on different things like switching gears when they fail. I watched as he went through the mixing procedure and as he made remedies for problems that come up at random. My friend would describe what he was doing, and why, and would constantly answer my queries.
The record by itself actually did not go anywhere. However, what I mastered during that experience and others like it has carried me through many different jobs and projects since that time. In those moments when I do not have a sound tech handy, I am no longer completely lost; I can work with the equipment on hand to figure out what I need at the moment. Moreover, the experienced trained my ear to listen to tracks that are not well mixed and at the same time it also helped me gain enough understanding to handle such mishaps. At present I am now capable of detecting what is really wrong with the track rather than just knowing that something is wrong.
I’m not a sound engineer, and have no dreams to be one. The essential point, though, is that what I learned in the recording studio was learned by doing – through a combination of mentorship and experience. This is because audio engineering is largely learned exactly that way – by someone displaying you the ropes, and through practice and experience.
My friend with the recording studio had in fact been to school, and he had learned a lot of methods he probably would not have picked up on his own. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that even after obtaining that education, my friend was compelled to offer me unlimited free studio time so he could gain experience running his own studio – even after going to school for it. Despite the advantage he got from his education, my friend still finds it insufficient and he wanted more experience.
The results are more important regardless of where you got your education. This is what I realized in the recording studio.