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Re: Recording Engineering
Jared,
If you were closer, I would invite you over to sit in on a mixdown and dubout session on a 5.1 project I am working on. I have been at this on and off since early December and the project is possessed, absolutely haunted.
As a recording engineer you have to be able to take enjoyment in sitting through the same piece of music over and over and over. I am confidant that I have heard this piece more times than the composer and arranger put together. Maybe ten times more. While some projects are not as intense (or have as many problems as this one) you still will perform the same. Take a country show I engineered many years ago. Our first order of business was tuning the drum tracks. We started with bass, then snare, then upper toms, then floor toms. We never moved off the first song while doing this. Starting at noon, we finally broke for a meal at 8PM and then started back finishing with the overhead tracks and getting an overall mix of just the drums around midnight. All without leaving the first song. We started the next day at 8 AM and by noon or so we had everything but the vocals tuned. After lunch we started into the vocals and by about 5 we were actually starting to listen and mix the second song in a one hour show. The engineering part of this is hearing something that you need to fix or make sound different, knowing what you need to add to correct it, and figure out where in the signal path it needs to be placed for the best advantage. If you are engineering the session, the mixer will depend on you to know everything about all of the equipment, what special tweaks it might need to sound just right, or how to load software that might change it's operation.
The real engineering part for me is having to modify hardware, repair equipment that isn't functioning just right, be able to hear and identify minor issues and know where the problem is actually occurring. Recently, that meant identifying a digital echo was occurring in a digital transfer that was not the slap of a piano hammer coming from the side of the piano that was in full stick. One is unavoidable and the other required a complete dubout after the problem was identified and corrected (rebooted).
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Good Luck All. Learn something new, everyday!
Al
WB9UVJ
www.wildstang.org
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Storming the Tower since 1996.
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