whew. okay. im sure theres a post about this earlier but im a bit on the impatient side and a little on the inebriated side of things at the moment, so ill resurrect the question with a brief introduction:

okay, so i want to be an engineer. its what i want to be when i 'grow up' has been since 10th grade. im about a year out of high school now, attending a modest music school for my associates degree. the school has a modest recording program that im sure only touches on things, and im positive covers digital domains only - which greatly disappoints me, but i cant consciously hold such an inexpensive school to such a high standard. id rather not go to recording schools such as SAE in nashville or Full Sail due to the price and the distance from my present location in Atlanta. i pursued an alternative for a high-school diploma (i dropped out in otherwords) and on top of just plain not wanting to deal with core curriculum, im not sure i could get into a for-real 4-year college.

im having a really disappointing recording experience right now with someone who is not really in-tune with the sound we're going for (plus he's an asshole), but its cheap ($20 an hour). i personally think we captured our 'sound' more accurately for free on a tascam portastudio with 3 or 4 dynamic mics in my bedroom than with all his digital tom-foolery and expensive parlour tricks.

whatever...ill get to the point: what im asking is, would it be better to pay to go to a school and learn, get an internship (which is probably pretty difficult) and end up making coffee hoping that one day you'll learn something worth knowing, or just selling everything you own and buying some equipment and doing it yourself?

after our present situation with our recording engineer, the plan for us is to buy some semi-pro equipment (3 ADATS - which, disappoints me greatly because id rather go analog, but the budget does not permit, and im not in charge) and record demos on our own, in the hopes of learning what we need to move on to bigger and better things and possibly making a living.

but on a personal level, should i seek outside help (school or an internship), or should i teach myself from experience, listening to my favorite sounding records (which not to brown-nose, but most were recorded at EA), and reading books?

please excuse my rambling, the over-use of parenthetical asides, and my general naivity. and also thanks to all of you this whole website and forum has been an enormous help.

-wggns

well...ahhh.... I'm going to go ahead and respond because I grew up pretty much down the road from where you are, & I figure we drank from the same water at some point.

First of all, I might know about some of the people you're talking about in your post, and there's things I might be able to fill you in about, but I'm not going get into it here. Nobody in that town should be charging you $20/hr. and leave you unhappy. Send me a private msg. or an email and we'll talk about it.

Anyway, I think going to school these days to study recording is a waste of time and money. The best way to learn is to find a mentor, or at least a buddy that you can experiment and make mistakes with. If you want to record anyone else's music other than your own, you need to establish the experience and familiarity, so when you're "working", you don't fuck things up, which you WILL do, regardless.

You should probably decide as to how far you want to take it, and if you want to make a living doing this. If you want to try and break into a commercial/bigtime studio, you'd better be a big fan of Rap and modern R&B music because that's pretty much what's keeping these studios afloat these days. I'm not saying you won't learn alot by interning at a studio like this, but you're not exactly going to get a good education in the different possibilities of recording a real drum kit, for example. There really isn't any way you can develop your ears and critical listening skills if you are strictly working in a sample-and-sequence based form of "music"...

Moving along, your post said something about buying 3 ADATs, and I would urge you to not let that happen, especially since nowadays you could use that same amount of money and buy a much better sounding medium (which is probably an entry-level Pro Tools or equivalent setup).

As far a learning this stuff, you don't need to pay a school to teach you things that are easily found in the library or the internet. If you know what parameters you're working with, there are resources available for establishing a good fundamental knowledge. Applying it all and gaining experience is what really matters.

And read, son....READ.

wiggins wrote:(3 ADATS - which, disappoints me greatly because id rather go analog, but the budget does not permit, and im not in charge)

3 ADATs? On a budget? And you're not in charge? All of these things are absurd. Buy a protools system like someone else said, or buy one of these if you really want to have fun:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2579005557&category=41480

spoot wrote:3 ADATs? On a budget? And you're not in charge? All of these things are absurd. Buy a protools system like someone else said, or buy one of these if you really want to have fun:

like i said id much rather go completely analog. im not sure how my friend (who is paying for everything, or rather, his parents are) will take it due to our inexperience with it and the price of tape.

but maybe i can convince him if knew more about the products themselves. do you, or anyone else have a suggestion for a machine that'd do well for roughly $1500? if at all possible we'd like more than 8 tracks. theres a whole lot more i need to know. ive got a copy of 'the musicians guide to home recording' and im not sure how much help that will be.

it might be cutting our own throats not to have a pro-tools system, but i guess im one of those snobs that thinks its the 'easy way out' and isnt going to help me learn the fundamentals the way i should. to me its like buying a dirt bike before you know how to ride your tricycle.

thanks again

-wiggins

I think all three options are beneficial.

School: as has been proven time and time again, the actual electronic side of engineering, and the history of it, as well as acoustical physics etc. are all things you aren't going to learn unless you go to school. No engineer has the time to sit and tell you ALL of this stuff, except the ones who are getting paid to i.e. teachers.
"On your Own":Regardless of what everyone else is doing you have to develope your own way of doing things. Or more like discover what you like. because the sound part of engineering is pretty much opinionated.
Internship/working in studio: The benefit to this is that there are some things you can't learn from school or Fucking around on your own. For instance, how to deal with people, how the studio runs from minute to minute.etc.

ideally you'll want all three. Don't be fooled, internships aren't that hard to get. They're easier to get with some kind of paper saying you studied recording and/or some sort of mildly acceptable portfolio.

Chris

but maybe i can convince him if knew more about the products themselves. do you, or anyone else have a suggestion for a machine that'd do well for roughly $1500? if at all possible we'd like more than 8 tracks. theres a whole lot more i need to know. ive got a copy of 'the musicians guide to home recording' and im not sure how much help that will be.

First of all, buying ADATs is like buying a ball and some rope hoping to make a dirt bike out of it. a digital multitrack or DAW are more like settling for mopeds because you can't afford a dirt bike. (please leave the digi VS analog argument off this page. there's a whole post for it somewhere else)
ProTools digi 002 (as long as you have a computer) is 1200 for the rack mount. 16 analog inputs I believe. Also, an ADAT is good to use with the ADAT-ins on Protools because it gives you 8 more inputs, no ADAT tape necissary.
You could also look into digital multitracks like the Fostex VF160. 16 track digital multitrack, probably get it on ebay for $900.
Adat, as a main source of recording, is outdated.

Chris

Just wanted to throw in a few additional thoughts....

I went to a show at my school last night that I thought my friend and I were doing sound for. When we got there, it tuned out our services we not needed as two people from the SRT (sound recording technology) department were doing the sound.

While it sounded ok over all, the bands on stage were complaining and I guess the people running sound were blasting the guitars, bass, some drums and vocals back at the band all through one monitor.

While you can learn a lot at a recording school (and I know the quality varies school to school) I think there are several traps. Obviously, Universities want graduates to be a success, so they can make nice donations later, so a lot of classes are kind of showing you how to "make it big." Like, "these are the skills you need to produce a number one smash hit."

While that's all fine and good, I think too many people get caught up in it, and when you get assigned to do the sound for an indie band in front of 50 people the situation arises that's like, "my classes said technically this is supposed to work, but the band is unhappy."

While I've never attended engineering or recording classes, having learned instead doing live on-air sound at the school's radio station, I have had a lot of friends who are recording and music majors and who have learned a lot. The problem is that they are stuck in there with people who want to be working the next hotttt session and real world and how to practically apply those skills to little bands (where is probably where you're going to end up unless you are very lucky) sort of waves ta-ta.

cal wrote:Anyway, I think going to school these days to study recording is a waste of time and money. The best way to learn is to find a mentor, or at least a buddy that you can experiment and make mistakes with. If you want to record anyone else's music other than your own, you need to establish the experience and familiarity, so when you're "working", you don't fuck things up, which you WILL do, regardless.

I agree with a few qualifiers. I was an audio "major" at my community college for a few years. It worked fine. It was cheap. They had a nice studio and there were no assumptions about getting a job as a hot shot producer or anything. It was a good way to learn some basics.
Aside from that sort of low key education, I can't imagine going to a studio school like Full Sail would be beneficial.

That isn't to say that getting a proper education would not be beneficial.
I would hesitantly recommend (I say hesitantly because I've never done it, but it seems to make sense) do a double major in music and eletrical engineering (physics would probably work to if the schools available to you do not have an electrical engineering dept). You'll probably learn more useful things that way, and the things specific to audio engineering should be very easy to pick up. Besides, having a degree in electrical engineering is much more marketable than a degree in audio engineering. You can get a fancy job doing fancy things at some computer corporation and use the fancy money you make to build a fancy studio.

Please, for the love of God, do not by an ADAT. Warning!!! Warning!!! Warning!!!!!.

There are so many better options, both digital and analog.

No ADAT!!!!!!