[Sk106]

I think audio/media engineering really is serious technical profession that requires specific skills that takes years, sometimes decades, to develop. A skillset and an art that I respect very much and that no musician, only partially into recording, can even touch.

I once had an engineering guy listen to a song through a couple of earplugs from an MP3 player, and his comment was to try and adjust this like that and that like this – some of the comments were about the deep bass, which cannot be heard through small earplugs. Back home, I tried his suggestions, and it was like opening up a window to the music. I asked him later how he could possibly have detected and known that, listening through $5 earplugs. He couldn’t explain it at first, he said you got to practice your listening just like you train an instrument, or reading music, or your scent and taste to be a chief blender at a respected brandy distillery. It takes about 5 years of intense training to be able to detect the incredibly subtle nuances of scent and taste for that.

But after thinking about it, he said he heard it from listening to what he did hear. He told me astronomers can see if a really distant star has planets orbiting around it, even though they cannot see the planets themselves. They do this, by looking at the light of the star itself. If it’s got planets orbiting, those planets gravity sort of wobbles the star around just a slight bit and that causes the light from the star to fluctuate, pulsate in a regular frequency. Similarly, he couldn’t hear the deep bass, but he knew the effects a misused deep bass of a certain kind had on the phase, and upper frequencies etc. So, when he listened, he knew that what sounded a bit strange or odd with the sound, was caused by something he couldn’t hear through the earplugs.

I’ve used this guy as an engineer quite a bit through the years. He’s got the hearing of a dog, like when he listened - through bad speakers - to a song I made using the VSL orchestra sampling library and told me all of VSL's asmples has got an aliasing problem 14-16 khz due to bad downsampling. He has the understanding of what causes the desired and undesired and knows all the principles, gear, trends and standards of the times. It’s a god’s gift. And most of all, he knows to never ever step in over the musician’s area of things. The most he does is to drop quick and swift suggestions and impressions, and leaves it at that without expecting a response back. He knows he's there to record that which sounds, not to make it sound different/better.

I can definitely relate to “Most recording engineers are failed musicians. As a musician, I have very little respect for recording engineers”. At times, you walk into a studio, and suddenly you find yourself in kindof someone else's territory, where they are going to use your music to make THEIR recording and mix from. At worst, they barely look at you, just shove you in the room and don’t communicate, assuming that you have absolutely no idea about anything at all. They told you they want you to set up your instrument in the studio 2 days in advance (so they can tweak it to save themselves from your lame efforts) and tell you to remember to bring fresh drumheads and oil you pedals. Well, duh! At times you sit there behinds your instrument, rolling your thumbs waiting for 10-20 mins, watching them being hyperactive behind the glass, trying things, routing things, listening, discussing .. just treat you like they have to make something useful out of you, and if you can’t deliver what they need to make you useful then you’ll be patronized, like you’re a cardigan-wearing farmerboy who just entered a metropolitan super-gay makeover room.

Like I said, I think audio/media engineering really is serious technical profession that requires specific skills that takes years or decades to develop. It’s a pity that there are so few of those who really bother to. They can’t really be interested in developing those skills; they really must be aiming for other goals than engineering skills – perhaps becoming a John Mutt Lange musical producer? Who knows. But as long as engineers butt in on instrumental sound- and musical decisions, there will be social problems. There always has been. I have almost never seen a musician tell an engineer his job, I wish they would do the same for us.