Advice to Recording Engineers

The fulcrum is one of the most powerful tools an engineer has in their arsenal. The pressure point by which all things pivot. A simple leaver that can make children teeter on the brink of space or take them down to a dangle boards certain grounding. With a proper fulcrum in the right position, mountains can be moved, tides can be turned, hearts and minds can be manipulated. Recording studios are a teeter-totter for musical artists. They can teeter them toward the sky or rush them toward the ground.    The fulcrum establishes the amount of effort you'll have to apply to achieve your goal  ... the decision-making process a business owner, an artist, anyone employes to operate and grow their efforts.  Who , what , when , where and how . The answers to these specific questions help place the fulcrum of an endeavor. Leaving any of those questions unanswered, or less than a concise understanding of what the answer means, is to leave to chance the placement of th...

It’s easier to make big …small, but to accomplish the opposite is tricky at best. Trying to get Big, small is way easier than the opposite. Let me explain: Establishing your mixes foundation on large monitors, then moving to smaller monitors for refinement is practical. If you build your mix in the opposite way chances are, you are going to be disappointed. That disappointment will lead to, metaphorically speaking, chasing your tail in an expensive nonproductive circle. By The Way ...Headphones (regardless of cost) are considered "small speakers". Today’s deliveries need to play well on a wide variety of playback devices. It’s all about delivering a product that will play well on 3 screens …phone, home and theatre. To restate; building a mix for large screens allows you to refine the mix to play well on small screens (smart phones) ...the same mix. To start your mix off mixing for phones expecting to refine the same mix for large screens is going to be a costly time suc...

 Hang: With the push of a button or the swiping of a finger across a screen ...poof, an audience is entertained. Instantly they are rewarded with the content of their choosing. Seldom if ever does the audience member consider the structural events that have taken place to present their chosen content to them. Be it news, movies or music, the technical aspect of providing media content to a broad market is managed by people. People with feelings and ambitions, not necessarily congruent with one another, work together to deliver the content. Emotion generally weighs heavily over pragmatism when it comes to entertainment. That formula holds true for any human involved with the production of media. The percentages of emotion-over-pragmatism vary with the people involved in its production. News broadcasts are at the low end of the emotion-over scale where music capture is at its highest. Either way, quilts hanging on a garage wall or black walnut walls with motor driven drapes to ...

We usually speak of the things we love weighted towards its positive aspect, the ones that attract us. The recording studio business has a lot of positive aspects. Recording Studios are usually dimly lit, vibe filled, creative environments open to social practices you’d never see in any business catering to the general public. Here is my last blog for you who have followed me (Thank you by the way). In analog you have positive and negative energy pulses. In digital you have ones and zeros. Basically, you cannot have one without the other. Think about it …can you have an up without a down, a right without a left, a good without a bad a happy without a sad. The answer is obviously no. To restate …you can’t have one without the other. Here is “the other”: Artistic people are generally “a little different” from polite society. They will most likely present as being sensitive, introverted and reserved. Some come across as pretentious all-knowing people who are some gifts...

  Oh, we’ve all seen the pictures. Pictures in ads and interviews with celebrities sitting at an audio console. Oh yeah, audio engineers get to spend time operating cool looking equipment. We get to "play" with: More Lights per Dollar (MLPD). If a person is going to make it in the recording studio business ...they must quickly become aware that this is a service business . It is an audio engineer’s job to ensure their client’s needs are met allowing for an optimum performance from them.                                 Confidence can either sustain or kill you. Audio Engineers are Background People. It’s only been in the past twenty years or so that audio engineers got credit on the projects they poured their hearts and souls into. The best engineer's performances are invisible to the audience they capture for. What we actually do is to make sensitive people comfortable in a foreign environme...

Fathers are full of advice, mine was and so am I. My father was an aeronautical engineer. His favorite saying was “…son, any fool can fly an airplane,  but that fool will eventually end up on the side of a mountain”. The same holds true for DAW’s and Recording Studios. This engineer’s empirical knowledge says, anyone can learn DAW software but put that person in a class A recording studio and they will eventually choke. To Choke ; an act in which a team or a person collapse when they are expected to win no matter what. I just saw it happen. It happens to the best of us at the worst of times. As cops and firefighters are held to a higher standard, so are recording engineers. We are not allowed to choke under pressure. The engineering of musical content, capturing another’s artistic expression, is one hell of a responsibility. It is not one to be taken lightly; it annoys me when I see it happen.   I watched a young engineer abuse a drummer. To my friend who I saw a...