RRFC Advanced Audio Engineering Week 15 Mentor: Larry Goetz Studio: The Lair - Posted on 2016-07-30 by Justin Smith

      This week I assisted on a drum session and ran a short piano session. The drum session I assisted on was for engineer Keith "Qmillion" Lewis. He had a drummer in to record for a part on a song he was producing. I set up the drum kit and mic'd it as well. Keith had a sheet with all the microphones he wanted to use and I patched and Larry chose what mic pre amps to use. Keith ran the session and I broke down. The session went smooth and I got more experience with the patch bay, drum set up, and mic placement. The piano session I ran was was for two different producers. They had the same artist in playing piano for them. I set up two U87s on the piano and patched them to the neve 1272 mic pre. the session was really quick because the artist was really good. I set up, ran Pro Tools, and broke everything down. The week was really short but I got to use the patch bay and set up drums so the experience was great.

      Larry went over more mastering practices this week during the lesson. I wanted to make sure I was using the best practices when I was working with the master bus. He went over what he does and what plug ins he uses. He also went over different ways other mastering engineers do it. He basically told me there is no right way but that I should never use mastering to "make " the record. The mix should get it 95 percent there and mastering is just the polish at the end.

-Justin Smith