Opinion: What Makes an Engineer Great?

[peopleperson]

One who can manage to make a customer happy regardless how goofy their requests may or may not be. This is a service industry after all.

 

[bigtoe]

chops and communication skills...not necessarily in that order depending on the situation.

i'm fairly amazed at the amount of talking down to musicians that i regularly see or hear about.

OK to the pod.

Mike

 

[mikeh]

Having spent a fair amount of time in a lot of studios (mostly on the studio side as a player vs. the control room) I too have been surprised at how often the engineers fail to be nice and do indeed act like the musicians are a pain in the ass (although I suspect numerous encounters with self absorbed musicians may be the root cause of that). I am sometimes amused when the 2nd or 3rd engineer (perhaps someone who just last week was still cleaning the toilets) already have an attitude.

I make every effort to be cooperative, to delay any questions until the engineer is done with the set-up, to ask whatever questions I have in a way that takes the least amount of the engineers time and attention, and most of them still act rude. Oh well, having engineered enough crappy sessions myself, I guess I can understand how an attitude can develop.

A suppose that is why the producer has to work betwwen the artist and the engineer - (it's the producer's job to communicate and draw out the best performance, etc) the problems come in when the same guy acts as the producer and engineer and can't figure out which hat to wear when!!!

 

[Strave]

One who can manage to make a customer happy regardless how goofy their requests may or may not be. This is a service industry after all.

This thread is really interesting... it's pretty cool. I personally find this to be a product industry... but again I guess I'm combining production and engineering... I can't really seperate them since all my favorite engineers also produce for the bands they engineer.

 

[fraserhutch]

One who can manage to make a customer happy regardless how goofy their requests may or may not be. This is a service industry after all.

I dispute this, it is quite possible to achieve this and still be a crappy engineer. Trust me, a guy I know is a great salesman, has his client's convinced he's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but at best he's a mediocre engineer.

 

[fraserhutch]

Having spent a fair amount of time in a lot of studios (mostly on the studio side as a player vs. the control room) I too have been surprised at how often the engineers fail to be nice and do indeed act like the musicians are a pain in the ass (although I suspect numerous encounters with self absorbed musicians may be the root cause of that). I am sometimes amused when the 2nd or 3rd engineer (perhaps someone who just last week was still cleaning the toilets) already have an attitude.

I make every effort to be cooperative, to delay any questions until the engineer is done with the set-up, to ask whatever questions I have in a way that takes the least amount of the engineers time and attention, and most of them still act rude. Oh well, having engineered enough crappy sessions myself, I guess I can understand how an attitude can develop.

A suppose that is why the producer has to work betwwen the artist and the engineer - (it's the producer's job to communicate and draw out the best performance, etc) the problems come in when the same guy acts as the producer and engineer and can't figure out which hat to wear when!!!

I can actually see how this starts to come about... In a number of sessions I have been involved in (like you, I am usually the musician in the session), some musicians actually believe they know more about capturing the sound than the engineer, and they just get in the way. Often times the engineer has to do things several times before a decent take can be achieved, just because they have to try it the musician's way first just to prove them wrong.

To be fair, this rarely happens with session guys; it mostly happens with bands. It has also happened to me in my studio.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

I dispute this, it is quite possible to achieve this and still be a crappy engineer..

I'm with frazh.

While there are a lot of great points in virtually every post in this thread, it does seem to be straying from the original question a bit. Everybody is doing a good job of pointing out the differences between a good engineer and a bad one, but I'd personally really like to hear more of what the differences are between the great and the good.

G.

 

[masteringhouse]

I dispute this, it is quite possible to achieve this and still be a crappy engineer. Trust me, a guy I know is a great salesman, has his client's convinced he's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but at best he's a mediocre engineer.

Ha!

I know that guy too ...

 

[masteringhouse]

I'm with frazh.

While there are a lot of great points in virtually every post in this thread, it does seem to be straying from the original question a bit. Everybody is doing a good job of pointing out the differences between a good engineer and a bad one, but I'd personally really like to hear more of what the differences are between the great and the good.

G.

There are a lot of facets to it, but to me a good engineer gets the sounds right. A great one puts priorities where they should be, getting a great performance from the artist even at the occasional sacrifice of sound quality.

It's all about the music, not making things sound technically perfect.

Could you imagine Bob Dylan with autotune?

 

[peopleperson]

Okay yeah, sorry. I was indeed pulling away from the subject at hand.

The difference between a good engineer and a great engineer is around 30 bucks per hour. There.