Beginning of school! - Posted on 2015-09-10 by Tristan Noe Jacobo

So this week I enjoyed my first two days of college inside Virlouise Studios with my mentor Bill Davidow. I went on Monday Sept. 7th and Wednesday Sept. 9th from 10AM to 5:30 pm. The first 3 hours we went over the curriculum and reviewed what I needed to know about hearing and waves. It was extremely intriguing and I understood it fairly well. After the curriculum was done one of Bill's Client's Rendell Young came over to work on re-editing one of his songs. Communication was a key role here Because Rendell had an idea in his head of what he wanted the sing to sound like and he had to explain to Bill what he wanted to do. Rendell decided to approach this project by recording note for note and beat for beat the entire song which made things simpler yet complicated. Something I noticed about him was his perfectionist attitude. He tuned before he played every note and made sure that the note wasn't buzzy in any way and was a pure as possible to keep it in the mix. While shadowing them I observed them working with Protools 10 HD, a Fender J-Bass guitar, an Avalon VT 737SP, Adams S3A monitors and a mac pro computer. It was amazing to see just how professional they worked and how everything needed to be perfect. The next day I was able to experience the type of people to avoid working with. A client came in to pick up his master CD of a live performance that was mixed and edited by Bill but the client had told him something different than what he wanted in the past. He then told Bill "You're just the engineer and I'm the producer" even though this client never produced a record whereas Bill does this for a living. This experience gave me some insight on the good and bad side of audio engineering and how to best deal with people in this situation. It was definitely a learning experience. I look forward to what the next week has in store for my education and experience!