You can find all the information about analogue and digital audio on the internets, right? Even better, you can watch YouTube videos and tutorials and conquer all knowledge needed for a successful recording, mixing, mastering, producing, studio acoustics and more.
It is indeed all there.
Like you have knowledge/ability to read and write alphabet and you have your computer keyboard with those letters printed there. So you can successfully write poetry even without proper grammar, and by learning bits of grammar you can write best-sellers. And you know how to save your document to hard disk and print, I hear you say.
Well, learning about sound behavior, recording, editing, mixing and producing involves far lot more than you can imagine while dreaming/wanting to become producer or recording engineer. Some things are quite easy to understand, some things demand certain concentration and persistent interest but most things require great dedication, genuine interest and combination of artistic&technical obsession. While those things have their respective requirements in order to achieve certain level of competence, there is ability of “hearing” and “recognizing” that steer prospective producer and makes or brakes his/her success. Some producers CAN be very weak on technical side of the process while still deliver MAGICAL results. But vast majority of them (especially nowadays) are fully technically literate in more than one area of sound and music-making production. And “magicians” are so rare that I would not relay on the odds that I’ll be the one.
Some of the first things that seasoned musician but novice recording engineer/music producer thinks of is an audio interface with DAW software, couple of microphones and monitors/loudspeakers. Technically speaking, someone equipped like that can proceed making great recordings.
But technology won’t make great music. Technology is just a translator of the performance. Performance is the most important thing to get great music recording. People are most important factor – and in a case of group recording/performance – synergy between people.
I would always rather have technically inferior recording of the great performance than vice versa. There are numerous examples of that throughout the music history. And it does not even stops there – in my view, if some of those “inferior” recording will be remedied they will just completely loose the main ingredient and would become lifeless. There is a reason why certain songs became successful despite the rather odd technical envelope.
This article will be continued and expanded, but for now this is all you get on this part of this webpage.
Bellow you can see the topics and areas we cover in our education program.
Tonči Bakotin
Sound generation
Sound behavior
Psychoacoustics
Sound levels
Decibels
Acoustics
Studio wiring
Microphones
Mixing consoles
Frequency processing
Dynamic processing
Effect processing
Analogue recording
Digital audio technology
MIDI technology
Sampling and sequencing
Synthesis
Production techniques