Johnny Blaze said:
I'm not necessarily a newbie at engineering.
This is a good thing, sort of an apprenticeship over time. Working with different people is also a good thing to gain depth in the knowledge you have as well as widen the breath of knowledge. Recording is part technical, part art, and as you gain your own experience behind the console (big or small) you're going to leverage the technical knowledge you've gained as well as apply your own artistic aspects.
One of the things I often recommend is to hitch yourself to a professional studio, and VOLUNTEER a few hours a week. Larger studios always need a extra pair of hands, and most studio owners do very much like people who are eager to learn. And yeah, they'll hand you bags of mic cables to unknot and sort, but its a worthwhile tradeoff to sit behind a professional recording engineer during a few sessions, and ask all the questions you want. Depending on the studio, you might get to sniff gear you'd otherwise only see pictures off in magazines.
The last pro studio I co-owned was in upstate NY, about 45 minutes north of NJ. A local community college had approached us to see if we were interested in sponsoring apprenticeships in small numbers. As a studio owner, this translated into free labor and pizza vaccuums (college kids can sure eat!), and an opportunity to "pass the craft" so to speak to people who were genuinely enthusiastic about this aspect of the recording industry. There were a couple of clients I'd halt the apprenticeships for, simply because time was compressed and we needed a higher degree of focus (without the distractions of "why that much compression?) type questions, but for the most part this actually was a lot of fun for the apprentices as well as the employees of my studio. There is a little bit of "teacher" in all of us I guess.
Anyway, this is just an idea. I'm not suggesting that you're friends aren't an appropriate way to learn the craft, just suggesting that spending some time with professionals who do this for a living, might ADD to your knowledge in a way you'd not expect - and it can only benefit you and your future projects. And I'm not suggesting spend 60 hours a week volunteering - you need to eat of coruse - but even 4 hours a week during an evening session might be very much worthwhile.
I found that most of the college students (apprentices) the college sent over were very stiffled in the creativity area. The college thought their recording classes very rigid and while they offered tremendous amount of information, really useful information, they did approach it like any other classroom - memorization of equipment functionality, term papers on history of recording, instruments, etc, and a lot of the "art" aspect was left off.
What was cool is the student's final exam was to create a "professional grade" recording. The school had its own recording lab with antiquated equipment for the students to use at will, but most of the students that apprenticed with us asked to use our studio. What do you say to that? I'd give them a used real of 2" tape and say "studios not booked on monday morning at 8am, knock yourself out". It was typical for the students to record their girlfriends which had interesting results at time
, but a couple of the students actually put together a full rock band by asking friends to play drums, bass, guitar, etc, to play in the studio for them to record, even though they weren't a band beforehand. Sort of an "play together now, I need to record something".
Anyway, I know I sidetracked, but I think in the story you might see the suggestion I'm making - volunteering free labor in small doses might afford you an opportunity to learn some knowledge that you might never be directly exposed to - only read about in magazines. And that might be helpful to you and your projects going forward.
And it doesn't matter what equipment that studio uses, protools, otari 24 tracks, nada. Its the techniques and concepts you want. What color the knobs are is irrelevent. Good luck!
