I started around 14 when I accidentally put a head phone jack into a mic input on an old stereo/karaoke machine. Later I move on to high tech stuff like hand held recorders including the Home Alone Talk Back. I've always played in bands and always recorded them. At around 15 I started making records in real studios and I can still remember every moment of every session I've done. I watched every move those engineers made. I just thought it was natural to want do what they do. Then a friend bought a house and we built a studio. I've never thought of myself as an engineer. Never thought of myself as an artist or even a musician. It's really just been natural. But don't let that fool you. I suck at it and have little to no understanding on how or why things work. I'm impaired by a lack of intelligence and talent and have only made it this far from a combination of dumb luck and determination.

Mostly cause I love the constant impoverishment,it's done wonders for my abs! really

1st post- don't flame me out.i want to fuck with stuff. i wanna blow out ribbon mics and slit speakers. i want to put mics in water bottles on the other side of the room. i want to turn all the knobs up to 10. i want to have you play your trumpet in the fucking bathroom. yes, i want to put a fucking mickey mouse tape player mic on that trainwreck amp. i want to be a mad scientist and play a mixing board like an instrument. i've been messing with whatever i can get my hands on since i was 9 years old. i made my first record in a studio last summer and i saw my masterpiece get burned to the ground by someone who had no clue what i was looking for. i want to be everything that guy wasnt. i want to make records. real fucking records.

I love all the fun toys, switches, buttons, and blinking lights I get to play with.On a more serious note, I love engineering because it enables me to create the frame, or the sonic context in which the listener perceives the music, much like the concept of the frame in the visual arts. Like composing a photo, the choice and positioning of the mics, the amps and instruments you use, and the choice of room have a big influence on the way the performance (or work) is perceived, and I really enjoy seeing how those choices (and others) can affect the finished product when I'm making a recording. It's a great feeling knowing that you've created a sonic context that conveys a great performance effectively, especially when it puts a smile on the face of the musicians you're working with.

steve wrote: The time to decide if you want to be a parent is before you are one, but once you are one, you can't really undo the decision if you don't like it.-steveGood point.Translated into my life: Somebody's got to record my records, and I have very little money. Somebody's got to record other peoples records, and i can make them sound like not-shit.

Because I have a weird fetish for patchbays(you think I'm joking but I'm really not)

For most of my life, I thought I wanted to do something technological as a career. More specifically, I had an interest in Information Technology. Working with computers to solve problems seemed exciting to me.As my interest in underground music began to grow throughout high school, I finally set upon learning an instrument. Christmas of junior year, my parents got me an electric bass. I became enthralled with playing it, practicing over six hours a day right from the onset. Knowing by then that playing music would easily become a lifetime commitment to me, I spent the following summer working and saved up enough to buy a Music Man Stingray.During that summer I also started playing six-string guitar. Naturally, upon becoming competent in both instruments, I began to write songs. Recording them was a given, since as a freshman and sophomore I picked up basic audio skills through trial and error, doing a weekly op-ed podcast using the cheapest equipment I could find.It later dawned on me one night early in the following year while working on college applications, all for IT programs, that I could do something with audio or music instead. Despite spending most of my high school career involved with audio and obsessed with music, the thought had never even crossed my mind. Several weeks of soul-searching later, I finally settled upon attending a local community college as a Music major, in order to save money and get the General Ed. requirements out of the way, before transferring to a four-year school.Meeting with my counselor that summer to sign up for classes, she delivered to me an ultimatum; Assuming I wanted to be involved with industry, did I want to focus on production or audio engineering? The business side versus the technical side. Of course, I chose the technical side. I figured that, with a good amount of common sense, business could be learned better by doing. To fulfill this, I started an indie record label, about one month after that meeting. Not only am I learning oodles, but I'm getting to work with music I love. I'm also still recording my own music and am tentatively planning on attending UCSD for their Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts major after my two years at the CC are up.So, that's essentially the story compacted into one, possibly self-indulgent, post.[Edit]:USERNAME ALREADY IN USE wrote:Later I move on to high tech stuff like hand held recorders including the Home Alone Talk Back.Hahaha, I had one of those!

In all honesty, it's because I love playing with music and creating different sounds.I'll be honest here. I know fuck all about engineering or recording other than hitting record, playing, stopping recording once you're done. And I've never actually recorded anything other than on my computer, but that's the way us kids learn these days.Which is why I'm here. I want to learn to do it right, and this seemed like a good place to start.

Great post, Sail!For me, i'd determined early on that there had to be a reason why bands were sounding the way that they were on a recording, but I didn't know how or why it was. I saw some of the same names on my favorite bands' records---Andy Wallace, Steve, Brian Paulson, John Agnello, Jack Endino, Dave Jerden, Don Smith, Butch Vig, etc. I knew that they probably all had their own style, seeing as that some bands like Tad and Nirvana had worked with Steve, Jack and Butch--and the records all were quite different from each other. Not only that, but I wanted to figure out how a producer, engineer, mixing engineer, assistant engineers and mastering engineers all imparted their sound, since i'd heard demos and songs with early mixes/ early stages of production and they weren't quite to where the finished, official versions were. Sometimes the earlier versions were also better than the final ones. Some guys like Dave Jerden, i'd realized, their sonic signature was very slick--it worked with some bands, and the atmosphere and big reverbs didn't work with other bands.Most of my wanting to learn the technical details of recording is pretty self serving. I needed it for my own recordings, and the reason for that is because I don't think that anyone really understands an artist or musician better than they, themselves do. There will be people that are close, but if a band or musician is really in tune with what they're doing and what they want to hear and hear the things in their head of how they want it to go, it will inevitably be fairly difficult for some producers/ engineers to replicate....at least without the artist not being totally happy with it. It just becomes a matter of getting their vision down on the recording. Through trial and error over the years on some rudimentary equipment (ghettoblasters, 4 track, 8 track), i'd learned the basics of recording and setting up microphones and got better equipment (guitars, amps, mics, recording equipment) to get what's out of my head onto the medium, and it always seems to end up sounding the way that I want (granted, sometimes it takes a fair bit of tweaking and work). Or in a shorter explanation--I always at least wanted to be the one to screw it up, if anyone was gonna screw it up, ha ha. I'd also heard examples of where some producers/ engineers were just looking at the clock and didn't care about the bands. Which is like any job--there's some things that you like and some things that you dislike--but when you're dealing with a recording, it's basically like delivering a baby, so it needs some care and sincerity, I think. I just really love the whole idea of experimenting with acoustic sounds and electronics (mics, amps, recording equipment, synths, etc) to try and expand on what's already there in the initial vision.

I'm no engineer, but the reason I started recording is probably just because there aren't any studios in my area that offer good sound at a reasonable price. Just like I started playing drums because I couldn't find a reliable drummer I could work with. At some point, instead of just recording my own bands I would like to work with other bands in the area, mostly because I feel like Lexington deserves an affordable studio, there are plenty of musicians here with good material that could benefit from better recordings. Now I love playing drums more than playing guitar, and love recording more than playing drums. Who would have figured?