Who went to school for recording? Who hometaught themselves?

  • Thread starter Thread starter monkie
  • Start date Start date

What school did you went to for recording?

  • Full Sail

    Votes: 9 2.4%

  • IPR (Institute of Production and Recording)

    Votes: 2 0.5%

  • Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA)

    Votes: 7 1.8%

  • SAE Institute

    Votes: 6 1.6%

  • Los Angeles Recording Workshop

    Votes: 1 0.3%

  • I taught myself recording

    Votes: 301 79.2%

  • Others

    Votes: 54 14.2%
  • Total voters
    380
self taught/MMI

i taught myself a bit but didnt get the e.q. ing and compression bit too well. i should have just bought a book to learn but instead i went to Madison Media Institute and it cost me $7,000 for a year. i left because i learned what i needed to learn about mixing and a bunch about the business end and one of the teachers was a dipshit pothead and didnt teach a thing and i had him for 3 classes.

they had a wall of graduates and their successes and it was pretty sad. most of them did madison area projects that went nowhere or were currently teachers at the school and the guy that had the most accomplishments posted i later saw was the janitor. they would brag about a student here and there that were currently in california but it just so happened i had connections to these people and they were back in madison working in a sub shop and the other was back in madison working at the sub shop across the street from the other guy months later. they had gotten job placement in california at $6.50 and couldnt possibly survive.

get a pc and some mixing software and a couple books and start recording. pick out some of your favorite music and listen to its production 1,000 times and then take some recorded tracks and compete with it until you cant possibly listen to either of the songs ever again.

i chose the song "closer" by Nine Inch Nails. my mixing skills may not be the best but my production skills are at times phenomenal. and who gets paid, the mixing engineer or the producer? other than bob mould i dont know of any engineer that gets close to 6 figures but we can all name 20 producers that do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

myspace.com/xghostx3
 
they had gotten job placement in california at $6.50 and couldnt possibly survive.
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FWIW, minimum wage in CA is now $8.75, and was $7.25 for about a decade before that

but yea, still not enough to live on
 
i went to school for it....learned very little, most of what i do know is self taught.
 
I taught myself, but after a few years decided to do an audio engineering course, and ended up at the SAE.
It's not the best choice I made.
I wanted to gain more knowledge about recording/mixing and learning the tips & tricks.
Unfortuanately the first year(I'm doing the parttime course) was mostly theory. Almost no practical lessons. I saw a studio from the inside after 5 months.
I cannot say if the course is of great value for me. I sometimes have the feeling that I learn more from my fellow students than from our teachers.
 
i taught myself as well... but like moon stated I am enrolling in at SAE in ATLANTA this coming year. I have talked to ppl about it and toured it a couple of times... i hope its not boring and i hope i learn GREAT THINGS! I am optimisitic about it.
 
Unfortuanately the first year(I'm doing the parttime course) was mostly theory.
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IMO, that's the way it should be, especially if you're dealing with expensive mics, consoles, monitors, and outboard. it's the same thing as the army - you're going to have to get through boot camp before they hand you a gun and send you out into the field. the program that i took had almost no hands-on experience the 1st semester...the teacher passed around a couple of mics and parts(diaphragms/capsules/whatever) for us to check out, and we got to mic up a kit and amp a couple times, but the rest was all theory/fundamentals.

this really bored the crap out of and frustrated a lot of people, but this is also when we learned about sine wave/phase properties, comb filtering, standing waves, balanced/unbalanced connections, which pin on an XLR is hot and which is cold, what the different types of mics are, how they work, what phantom power is, the difference between active and passive monitors, etc. etc.

i know it seems boring as all shit at 1st, but you have to assume with an entry-level course that the people coming in know NOTHING about the recording process, and then supply them with the fundamental information that they need to properly operate gear that cost thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

after spending the 1st semester listening and learning, we spent the 2nd semester getting hands-on, and recording/mixing a single song for our final...the next semester was for getting intimately acquainted with ProTools, then the final semester is nothing but tracking and mixing. while no 2 programs are going to be identical, i'm sure that places like SAE and Full Sail are similar...the farther you get through the program, the more capable you are, and the more the instructors are going to trust you to not wreck(or steal) shit.
 
@ Ironklad Audio: I get your point.

But hey, all we got was from sheets. I mean, we had lessons about dynamics and EQ and all was just on a piece of paper. The teacher just told us stuff, but never let us listen to it. We had lessons about mic placement, but never hands on. There were no practical lessons on how it sounds when you turn the knobs on a compressor or on an EQ. Must've been the teacher, because he was fired during the course. And I believe or hope that this is not common.

But the thing was that we just got into the studio after 4/5 months of the regular diploma program (that was 8 months in total, first 3 months are Basic Media Certificate). So there you are, sitting behind an SSL console and you don't know shit about it, other than from the fucking manual. What kind of crap is that!? We had four hours of familiarization. Two weeks later I had to do a solo-recording in 2 hours!!!!!. It worked for me, 'cause i had some experience and I practiced at home.
 
yea, that's pretty bogus...at least our teacher would give actual demonstrations of stuff after explaining it. like when he went over the difference between ribbons and SDC's and LDC's, he followed it up by mic'ing a piano with one of each, and letting us hear the differences in how they responded.

and yea, we weren't taught how to use the console at all until the 2nd semester...i think it was more to keep the people who were there just to fuck around from being able to, well, fuck around with it.
 
I wish our teacher had done that.
It ruined our 1st band recording, because we never had decent mic placement.
So after our first session, when we recorded the drums, another teacher gave us an extra lesson in mic placement. If we had that lesson before I'm pretty sure we've had a much better drum sound. Now the kick is just a very loud box of cardboard :D
 
I want to learn the theory behind all of that stuff to be honest... i have learned most of what i know b/c i "mock" others AND THEN find out the real reason they do that (compression, limiting, EQ, panning, fade in/outs...etc.) I want to KNOW for myself... im excited about going to school for a year straight and making my life NOTHING BUT music for that whole time.:D
 
notredamer0789 said:
I want to learn the theory behind all of that stuff to be honest... i have learned most of what i know b/c i "mock" others AND THEN find out the real reason they do that (compression, limiting, EQ, panning, fade in/outs...etc.) I want to KNOW for myself... im excited about going to school for a year straight and making my life NOTHING BUT music for that whole time.:D
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That's what I wanted as well, but with practical lessons!
Enjoy your time, book early and study hard!!!! :)
 
I don't know if its already been stated but none the less I'd like to add my two tracks worth. School is definitely not for everybody. Honestly its a real pain in the ass. I am about to graduate with my BA in Drama. It's the closest thing to an audio degree I could find and afford. So I enrolled and focused my study on theatrical sound design as well as video and T.V. production for my minor. This combination allowed for a fairly extensive study of audio for a variety of formats. So you don't necessarily need a recording specific program to gain a great education in audio.

Now is my BA in drama with a minor in communications going to get me a job at a recording studio? - well maybe, but probably not a first choice for the gig. Hopefully three years from now I'll have my masters degree and I think that will make me much more employable for the long term.

Being diverse in your skill set is key to being able to survive in this integrated media environment and I think a good program gives you that. Track an album one day, shoot a short film the next, and mix a concert over the weekend and be able to do any job that any one of those projects requires.

College has been great for me because you get out of it what you put into it and I am giving it everything i have. It also gives you opportunities like networking, playing with gear you might never get the opportunity to be in the same room with otherwise and most importantly the opportunity to screw up in very serious ways with out to much repercussion giving you the freedom to learn.
 
I honestly believe that there are two kinds of people out there: The ones who don't really care enough to go far, and those who do. And out of those who really do care, it doesn't matter if you go to school, or sit on forums, or walk into studios pretending your someone your not just to see what goes on in there. Everyone who truly loves it will learn recording any way they can. It's like an addiction. Personally, I've been teaching myself for years, but recently took some community college recording classes. I probably won't be going back. Unless they get reaper in there, that is...

But it just seems like everyone I met at school had the same mentality. "I'm going to get a degree, and then I'll get a job at a studio and get to record stuff!" I don't know, I just never felt like it was realistic (or beneficial to me) to try and "get a job" at a studio, I'd rather do my own thing. And if you go to school for recording don't record stuff for fun every chance you get at home, you might want to re think your career choice.
 
I think one of the things that people are missing here is that getting a degree in recording doesn't limit you to recording in studios...

It opens so many doors - audio forensics, R&D, installations, live sound, acoustics, studio design, equipment design/manufacturing, maintenance and so many more fields.

You learn a hell of a lot more than just about recording, at least on a decent course you do.
 
I agree with that. One cool story about going to school for this. I was able to meet and hang with Alan Parson after his guest lecture and presentation. Not going to lie..that man has a lot of knowledge about the recording world.
 
Wow I'm really surprised to read that scathing review of SAE's theory portion. Glad I didn't go there! I'm at Metalworks in Ontario and the theory stuff has been great! Of course we do some really basic "this is a compressor, this is how it works" stuff that isn't all that new to me, but then we'll go in one of the ssl rooms and they'll actually take some recorded material and let us hear how an 1176 sounds different from a la2a sounds different from a dbx160 etc. etc.

The most interesting thing was comparing plugins to the actual hardware units that they're cloning and seeing which ones were accurate and which were just way off!
 
I thaught myself, with the help of Tweakheadz.com/studio-central and several other sources...
 
i'll admit... i've learned recording the same way i have learned nearly everything else music-related... on my own.

the way i play... i wouldn't change that for the world because it would change my style.
but when it comes to recording... i'll admit, sometimes that part, i really wish i knew more about what i'm doing. but at the same time... i do like learning it as i go as well.
 
selftaught

I got into a small local studio to do an unpaid internship, but the only useful bit of information I learned from those guys was "Yeah, we just taught our selves by buying new gear, learning it, recording someone on it, and reinvesting the new money into new gear".

So I left, dropped $1k into some mics and an interface and got started. A year and a half later I'm still not making amazing recordings, but I'm definitely getting somewhere with understanding how things work and training my ears to get a better mix.

One other valuable tool I had was a contact with a guy that used to work at Abbey Road in the 50's. I would bring my mixes to him and he'd tear them apart and give me suggestions. He would also ramble on about why analog was so much better "back in the day"..... but it was good to be able to get his expert opinion and perspective which helped me to go back into the studio and improve things.


I've learned from self-teaching that you can't just buy the gear that you think will sound best based on their reviews. Sure it takes decent gear, but after that you've just got to experiment with it. I spent a month deciding on how to mic the drumset for my bands recording. I tried hundreds of combinations of mics and placements and mixes before finding what sounded right. And you know, the setup I ended up with is one that a recording school could have "taught" me, or a forum could have suggested to me, but the fact that I found it by trial and error, and that I knew why it sounded good, and why it sounded better than other possible setups.... that's where you actually learn something.... not when you do something the way that a forum or a textbook tells you to do it... but when you know from experience that its the best way to do it.
 
i learned myself but hopefully one day i'll go to one of them fancy schools.
 
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