After week six - Posted on 2014-05-19 by Devin Helmer

I have been learning a lot over the last few weeks at the studio. A lot of the information covered in the early weeks is technical in nature but nessecary in application. We talked about different file formats, cables, miking tequniques, microphone selection, polar patterns, frequency response and a bunch of other important base level information. While obtaining a general understanding of various aspects of audio recording and engineering, you realize any one focus has a vast amount of information you could spend studying. I mean can you imagine knowing the frequency response to every microphone that exists? So we try to learn the information in a way that is understandable an applicable. Just even things simple. Joe explained several of his artists have come in with an mp3 as the format for the "beat" they are recording vocals over. Either they put it in that format themselves when bouncing down there audio or they got it form another source and most likely had it emailed to them. Since mp3's dont take up as much memory as for example a wav. file the sound quality must be compressed to accomidate this reduction in file size. While the mp3 itself isnt ideal to record it may work for what the artist wants to get out of the song. However if the artist wants the engineer to give him a mp3 version after the recording session, youre essentianally compressing a sound thats already been heavily compressed. Recording and engineering is constantly evolving in technology and accesibility, it is important to keep up with the curve. It seems in this businees it can be almost beneficial to be a Jack of all trades as opposed to a Master of one.