I wrote this about 6 months ago on my personal blog, and thought I’d add it here. It is a bit of a rant that affects me in my line of work. But it looks forward in a positive manner as today’s failings are still shaping tomorrow’s success.
Today’s big rant is how progression in Music Technology, and the way that Music Tech has been marketed to young people, has left good, serious, young producer’s looking a bit silly and struggling to progress properly. Chat to any major studio, and you can tell them all sorts and they can’t stop telling you how you must come in and check out the studio, try some mixes on their desks, check out their Pro Tools rig etc. Then you tell them you’re 21, and all of a sudden they think you’ve never seen a Pro Tools rig, you think that Prism’s are pieces of glass, SSL is something you use to secure credit card payments and all compressors are in VST… and the only patching of stuff you’ve ever done was in Reason… and swiftly decide that their diary is actually a bit more booked up than they first thought, and actually you can’t come take a look around after all.
So, what is the reason for this? I have compiled a list of the top 3 reasons that young producers and engineers are put down without anyone actually listening to your work… This list comes from a collection of conversations with studio staff, my own experiences, and my friends experiences, and is not all my own opinion.
1) Everyone is a ‘Sound Engineer’. Every band has a person who could play guitar, but they already had 2 of them. They could play bass, but the band already had one of them too. They couldn’t play drums, and didn’t really fancy backing vocals. But.. you know what? Those mixing desk things don’t look all that complicated. They can be your sound engineer! We get a lot of these at work, in my various venues, who come in full of enthusiasm and before anything else get their photo taken with the speakers. They then swagger up to you, and tell you ‘they’re the sound engineer, ennit’. They spend the whole of the headline’s sound check twitching with excitement at getting hands on a big desk, and when you’re finished their eyes light up with such excitement that you’d think they’d just seen a Page 3 model walk past. Within 10 minutes, they’ve fed-back every vocal mic on stage, the kick drum is in the red all the time and there is no such thing as EQ except about 10dB boost on the low end of everything, because bass is cool. ennit. They spend loads of time twiddling knobs on their compressors despite the fact that they’re not patched in, and when you try to explain VCAs to them, they can just about manage to say ‘sort of like subgroups a bit then’. And that’s the only reason a lot of places still have an analogue board. Put them in front of a Digico like I had in Montreux, where nothing is even labelled as it’s all user-definable, and they’d probably cry and break it at the same time.
Don’t get me wrong, practical experience is the way to learn. But engineers coming up to me and saying ‘I’m new to this and the band let me do their sound, can you show me the ropes a bit’ gets people 100 times further than saying ‘out the way mate, im this band’s engineer’. I was just like the former a few years ago, and got my tuition in real time off some of the country’s best in-house engineers, rather than spending years having rubbish sound and being laughed at. But the problem remains, it’s the latter category of people which create the stereotype of the young engineer, and ruin it for everybody else. Confidence is wonderful; arrogance isn’t, especially when you clearly have nothing to be arrogant about.
2) Every year, another 10,000 ‘Qualified Producers’ come out of the colleges. And they all expect to come out, and walk straight into Air Studio 1 and pick up a full time job as a Producer for every band that comes through the door. Yet, just like above, you stick them in front of an inline console and they don’t understand why it has 2 rows of faders. The Mackie 8 buss they had at college only had 1 set. They don’t understand why you have to route the channels, the 8-buss was hard wired into the DigiRack. They don’t understand why the Digi-192 hasn’t got a volume knob on the front. They take one look at the patchbay and just crap themselves. Within 10 minutes they are sat in the hot seat with all the band looking at them, and have to slowly stutter out ‘I…. don’t… know…. what… I’m… doing….’ or, with an attempt at dignity, shout for the in-house – ‘your studio is slightly different to mine, could you just help me familiarise myself’ – yes, pros say that too, but they don’t need an 8-hour familiarisation. Either way, it soon becomes apparent to the band that the in-house has been in all day, and whether they like it or not they’re going to be coughing up the in-houser’s normal daily rate… not just the studio hire like their beloved ‘Producer’ promised them. And in many cases, they’ll have a quite word with said in-house afterwards, to the effect of ‘can we tell him we’ve got to cancel, and do the session with you instead?’
Again, I had to learn through time in studios making mistakes and getting help off the engineers. But likewise, a bit of honesty always helps and having them in the studio with you also reduces the likelihood of you blowing up their £10,000 monitors. Such behaviour, along with asking why the computer doesn’t have fruity loops, just checking that their beloved vintage Ribbon mic was supposed to have Phantom Power… wasn’t it? and other such habits are the root cause of anybody who started Secondary School after Pro Tools was invented – and became available en masse, being branded an idiot.
3) Too Many of the UK’s Studio Managers are Stuck in the Past. Because you didn’t mix your first record on a Tascam 8-track tape machine, you will never fully appreciate Pro Tools. Fact. Apparently.
As somebody who did have a gigantic Tascam 10-channel but 8-track (never quite understood that) recorder that weighed so much you needed a car to move it anywhere, I can see their point. Pro Tools is a lot easier and saves a lot of hassle. But we need to get used to the fact that DAWs are the new medium, and the fact that today’s young producers are brought up on DAWs rather than tape is just a reality that we have to face. It’s far cheaper, easier and better sounding to fit out a College Classroom with 30 iMacs with bring-your-own headphones, Logic 9 and Pro Tools LE than it is to fit out a College Classroom with 30 2″ tape machines, with any brand of console and bring-your-own headphones. And the fact that by the time these people hit the studios they are effective, proficient DAW users, is a good thing – although unfortunately the above situation does mean that there is little opportunity for new engineers to experience hardware consoles and outboard. And it simply cannot be denied that running your mix through a real SSL G+ and it’s buss compressor will always sound much livelier and musical than running it through the Waves emulation. And the reality is, if you apply simple logic, the transition from the aforementioned Mackie 8-buss to a G+ isn’t, actually, all that hard. 90% of the console, outside the Master Section, is exactly the same, just laid out differently and labled differently. But through the lack of practice, experimentation and true understanding of Analogue Equipment that modern Music Tech students are given, our ‘Qualified’ engineers are simply unable to transfer their working skills across. And this, yes, does go back to point 2. But I think if the Studios could wake up and see the value of in the box mixing, and it’s own place in music, they might have an overall more positive attitude towards the young people at the controls. Strongroom’s fairly recent venture into fitting an ICON board into Studio 2, as opposed to another SSL or Neve, is a step in the right direction for in-the-box mixing, which has become ever more popular due to it’s availability and cost efficiency.
So, in conclusion, the availability of Equipment, Education and ‘Employment’ has led to a great increase in the number of young people becoming involved in Music Production, and thus naturally a greater number of young people are succeeding in this industry. However, it is still clear that attitude problems both on the sides of studios and of the young people themselves is causing barriers between the two, which unfortunately affects guilty and innocent parties.
And thus I will continue to do what I do – hang out in the right places, meet the right people, constructively B.S people from what I read in SoS, and crack on working hard, developing my relationships with studios, producers and bands, which allows my CV to speak for me, not my age. And would advise others to follow the same route, as it seems to be working from my end. Providing people allow their work to speak for them, rather than their ego; and people can listen to each other’s work, rather than look at the statistics; I think that there is a bright future for the young members of the music production industry who are willing to put the time, effort and money on the table to succeed.
Dave
