Just a random question about mixers

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raptor48

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Hi,
I was just wondering roughly how much professional mixers would get paid? Are mixing jobs easy to get? I'm just wondering because school's finishing in about a year and a half, and I'm deciding on what I want to do.

Any response, advise etc would be great.


Cheers,
Stan
 
If you're looking to make a lot of money working on music you like as a professional engineer working on a big studio, you have about as much of a chance of that as you do becoming a first stringer for the New Zeland football team. That's not a reflection on you; that's simply a statement that the era of the big pro rock music studio is fast disappearing, as is their budgets for engineers, and there just aren't that many slots available.

If you want to make a living wage as an editor or engineer that works on audio and/or video for TV, commercials, radio, web and so on, that would probably be the most practical outlook to have in this business.

If you really want to dive in head first and go all in into the pot gambling the most against the longest odds for the best return, where you're far more than likely to fail, but if you succeed it could be sweet, you'll envelop your entire life into learning and practicing this stuff, keep your business and finance books from college, and build your own project studio of better than average quality. Attach a couple of top-shelf musicians to it, and start pumping out indie stuff.

To sum it all up into two words:

Med school.

G.
 
The first step would be to apprentice at a recording studio. You could even start doing that while you are in school, in your spare time. By working as an assistant you'd probably make little to no money, but you would learn the trade and also find out if being a mixer is even something you'd want to do as a profession.
 
SonicAlbert said:
The first step would be to apprentice at a recording studio.
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I used to give this answer also up until about a year ago or so. But now this is getting tougher and tougher to do for two reasons: a) the diminishing number of big studios, and, 2) more and more of the apprenticeships that are available at such places are being sucked up by recruiters for engineering schools like SAE and Full Sail. These schools are like the ticket agencies and scalpers of the apprentiship business, it's very hard for an "outsider" to get good seats in a studio because all the tickets are pre-sold to the agents.

Maybe the situation is different Down Under, raptor. And a little bit of networking, nepotism and patronige can go a log way to getting around the "agents" ;). It sure wouldn't hurt to buddy up to these people as best as you can and shop around Albert's suggestion and see what you can get, because if you can do that, that's still probably the best way to get one's feet in the pool.

But it's tougher than ever these days to go that route. The days of hanging around the open back door of Sun Studio and making coffe runs for the engineers until they finally allow you to come in and coil mic cables are fading fast.

There is always the option of actually going to a place like SAE or Full Sail to actually learn this stuff. These places are often pooh-poohed by many on these boards, but they can certainly teach a hell of a lot better information than what is floating around these boards. And you'd have the inside track on apprentiships and job placements.

But even they will tell you, practically on the first day, that the kind of engineering job you wind up with may not be what you envision. You could just as easily wind up editing radio commercials or producing Podcasts as you could mixing the next Midnight Oil.

I'm not trying to discourage you; just trying to give you the reality of the situation.

YMMV IMHO OBGYN

G.
 
Hey, thanks for the replies.

SouthSIDE Glen: Yeah, I think I'm gonna try and get into SAE somehow... Is that a highly rated institute? I was more wondering about if I actually DID a course at SAE, what my career would look like after that. As in what are my chances THEN, after doing that course. Btw, you haven't discouraged me, thanks for telling the truth.
 
raptor48 said:
Hey, thanks for the replies.

SouthSIDE Glen: Yeah, I think I'm gonna try and get into SAE somehow... Is that a highly rated institute? I was more wondering about if I actually DID a course at SAE, what my career would look like after that. As in what are my chances THEN, after doing that course. Btw, you haven't discouraged me, thanks for telling the truth.
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If you're looking along that route, probably your best source of info on how their job placement record is would be from the school itself. Of course they are going to try and sell themselves and will have a bias in that regard, but I would imagine that they should be able to supply you with pretty good information regarding their graduate placement record, apprentice programs and so forth. If not in their literature, I'm sure it should be available on request just by talking to one of their recruiters/admission officers (or whatever they call them.)

From some discussions I have been party to with actual students online and in person, they seem pretty honest with their students from the get-go about what to expect job-wise. Granted this is only 2nd-or3rd-hand info I'm giving you now, take it FWIW; but I've heard stories along the lines of the first day in class (or near to it anyway), the instructor asking for a show of hands from the class about just what kind of jobs or careers they'd be willing to accept. And that those who only raised their hands for something like "recording rock and roll bands in a major label record studio" were advised that they'd probably be very disappointed.

As far as SAE vs. Full Sail vs. Columbia School of Broadcasting, vs. the rest, I could not comment, as I have no real information for comparison myself.

One thing that comes to mind is that Tom V. - known on this board and to the IRS as "Mastering House" - is along with being a highly qualified mastering engineer, is also a professor of audio engineering at a college in the eastern US (I forget the name off-hand, but it's on his website.) I don't want to impose upon him, but maybe as a prof himself he might be able to give you some good info in this regard. Heck, the worst he can do is say "I don't know." :)

G.
G.
 
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