| My advice is to do what you love for a living, no matter what that is.
However....
If you have a chance to go to med school and be a doctor do it if you think you can get through the schooling, board certifying and residency. The world has more need for doctors than another recording engineer.
You ask:
Are you hustling every day?
If you want to work, yeah you hustle every day--especially early on. Right now there are five engineers for every recording nickle floating about.
Is it hard for even a talented engineer to make a living out of it?
Yes. And it isn't necessarily the most talented engineers that get the most work. The job is less about technique/engineering and more about networking and social skills than you'd believe. This job is pretty competitive--to make a living at it you have to be "the best" in many, many areas.
I think i looked up the mean annual salary for an audio engineer and it was $14000. I don't need to be rich, but that's a little too little.
Chances are you'll make less than that for the first five years. Money isn't why most of us do this. If you want to make money this is NOT the field to do it in!
Look at it this way--EVERYONE wants to make a living doing something fun... their hobby. I mean, how many doctors would like to make their living at playing golf (provided it paid as much as being and M.D.)?
But here's the catch: this job is a JOB. It's not "fun" really... not like it was before you did it for money. Yeah it's pretty cool and what I love to do best but it's WORK. It's a lot of work. Sometimes it's not fun at all, sometimes this job is LIVING HELL. Sometimes you wonder why you even do it, because you think back and remember a time when recording was "cool and fun."
I can assure you, this job has zero to do with fiddling with a kick drum sound for hours... you have about five minutes (or less) to get it right and move on to the next thing, because clients only pay people that can work fast, fast, fast that know what they're doing. I don't even know if I've ever tweaked a kick drum for more than twenty minutes... how can you tweak a kick drum for hours? I'm baffled here.... anyways I'm getting off subject.
Be smart. Be a doctor. Do this as a hobby and it will stay fun.
If you really love recording by all means ignore what I said--I just think you need to hear both good and bad perspectives. (Take it from me, I sold my soul for my career). Just approach this biz like you were going to have to be as good at recording as a doctor is at medicine and eventually things will work out for ya. |