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Originally Posted by PLAbass  I tell students every day that a position like this is pretty darn unusual these days. I'm just wondering to what extent. How many staff engineers are there out there? I assume most larger studios employ more assistants to help the freelance engineers that come in and bring the majority of work?
Who works at a facility with a staff of recording engineers? |
Actually, if anything it's becoming MORE commonplace, but at the same time it's harder to find/locate the jobs.
As commercial studios go belly-up, they are being bought or leased by production companies, composers and artists to use as a private facility.
The place I've been at for the last 8+ years is a perfect example of that. The studio used to be called 'King Sound' and was one of the more widely used studios in LA back in the 80's. Bruce Hornsby recorded portions of both of his albums here, don henley, the police, etc. have all been in here. It's a 3 studio, 25,000 sq ft complex. We can fit 40 musicians in studio A and regularly do 22 piece string sections and 20 piece big bands...
So who's all the music for?? US! We make music for TV and film licensing. We don't rent out the studio to the public. In fact it's tough even for friends of the owners to book time with us. As the music industry changes you are going to see this business model more and more... It's almost going back to the way things were... where the label or company making the music owned its own studio and all of it's artists/composers recorded in there.
Case in point, look at East West. They make sample libraries. They bought the old "Cello/United/Western" studios. While they are still booking out the studios commercially, the main purpose for them buying the space was so that they can create their own products there... studio rentals is a form of secondary income to them.
Also, film composers are now starting to have their own studios. Most 'big name' composers you can think of own their own studios that they do most of their work out of except for the 80 piece orchestral sessions. So as an assistant you might end up working at James Newton Howard's studio or Bear McCreary's studio instead of the Record plant or Capitol.
The tough thing in the future is going to be finding these places. Most places don't advertise that they have studios since they don't rent them out to the general public. So even knowing they exist so you can apply for a job there is going to be somewhat of a guessing game and word of mouth.