Hello everyone, I was wondering if i could do something to really start learning audio engineering, I'm planning to join the SAE once I graduate but at the same time I would like to know if I can start doing something already! at the moment I make HipHop related Beats and I do the daily workouts on here but i feel that this isn't enough for me!! Do you guy have any recommendations? :)))
Yep Reverse Enganeer. They don't teach how to spell but you get a great return for the money. So long as you don't want to get a paper cert from a 6 year masters of a very expensive college and wait in line against the fiercest of competition to get a job running coffee for an engineer that will show you stuff after 2 years if you stay that long because you need to pay off a loan.
What I did a while back when getting back into mixing after nearly a ten year hiatus was making an account on fiver and offering (relatively) cheap mixing with the express clause that I'm going to be sharpening my knifes (metaphorically) on the people's mixes who agree to work with me.
I would only take like 1 mix per month/fortnight depending on how much work it needed (rather than trying to pump out tons like if I was doing it for cash). This way I could experiment and practise at the pace I wanted, and because the person is getting cheap mixing, and you've already explained that you are offering it cheap for this very reason, most clients are fine with a bit of a wait if they are told upfront. This isn't a good thing to do once you've got the ball rolling, but to start out, or get back into the swing of it, it's a great way to wet your toes...
....Well, actually this is somewhat more akin to jumping in the deep end of a swimming pool to learn to swim, because you will get sent some really rough projects, but if you wanna get to grips with all the possible problems you can run into in a mix, this is by far the fastest way to come across them all! ;P It also gets you used to talking to and dealing with clients, which is a whole other skillset in it's own right!
Compression took me years to get to grips with. I understood the principle pretty fast, but actually hearing it took way longer. I would always way over cook things because that was the only way I could hear it, but more often than not compression is more of a feel thing than a hear thing (although the more time you spend with it, the more you can actually hear it). It's kind of a tricky one, cos unless your compressor is adding a lot of harmonics, you're more listening to what isn't there, or to the shape of the sound, rather than the sound it's self if that makes sense?
What I ended up doing was sticking a hardware optical compressor on my main PC output (can be a plug in and any type of compressor really - just optical is the slowest, so one of the harder ones to hear, and it's just what I happened to have as I got into DIY audio gear and built a bunch of compressors for myself). Although optical is great for vocals, so not a bad choice in this scenario.
I then spent months with it and every time I played a new YouTube vid or a new song, I would re-adjust it to taste ... and eventually I got super proficient at telling what exactly the compressor was doing as I was constantly living with it and constantly using it and dialling it in over and over again. I tried to incorporate practise into my leisure time without it getting in the way ofc. and it worked really well. I since did it with a bunch of different types of compressors, and that's how I got to know them all well. :)
I tried the same thing with EQ and saturation, but that doesn't seamlessly go well with leisure, as often any EQ you do makes the sound worse (if it's already well balanced) and saturation doesn't always compliment things. Sometimes EQ would help, but I find you get a lot less practise this way compared to compression, where 75% of YouTube vids are direct recordings from a nice sounding mic just with 0 compression and only about 24% have a sub par mic/recording environment that really badly needs EQ (this is more talking about bigger creators, and ofc if you always watch much smaller creators you would need to EQ more often). EQ and saturation is best to play about with over music that actually needs it in my experience, but the compressor over YouTube vids is a really neat way to learn and actually makes the sound better in most cases.
May 15, 19:11
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