Audience of One

Don't ever be a sound technician

Maybe the training process of all jobs as tiring, often boring and mostly nothing like the real experience of doing the job. Hopefully this is the case with being a recording technician as I spent about three hours in the studio yesterday recording a drum kit and double bass. It looks simple. Set up the microphones, make sure they don’t distort when you play them loudly, and press record. It’s not.

From my rather stressful session yesterday, I’ve learnt quite a lot, and hopefully in the future recording will get easier and easier. It’d better – I plan to do a lot of it at university. There was just problem after problem yesterday. The headphone levels were too loud; then they were too quiet; then the balance was wrong. Finally we got it about right, except that the level in the studio was appalling as a result and so I couldn’t play in time. Then I hurt my hand and couldn’t play any more – I spent the rest of the evening calling out section changes into a tiny talkback mic.

Then it was done! Or rather, we all came into the studio having done the first full take without technical problems, only to find we’d had musical problems. So we did it again. And again.

Finally, we got a take that was good. I’ll see when I come back to it next whether it was any good, or just our music-saturated ears and fatigued bodies telling us we wanted to go home. So home we did – via Charlie’s house to give him back the snare drum we’d borrowed. I got home from school at around twenty past seven, my almost full day of lessons having ended over four hours before.

Then I had to get up this morning to tidy the studio before anyone else needed to use it.

You can see why I might be slightly pessimistic about a sound technician’s life. I think doing it with your own equipment without a deadline looming and an arrangement you haven’t just made up the day previously might help though.

Matthew @ 14:24, March 23, 2005 to Diary | Comments (0)