What You'll Learn

During a great live musical performance there is an interaction that takes place between the performer(s) and the audience. If you record the sound in the room while the performance is taking place, the recording rarely, if ever, elicits the same emotions. Why is this?

Re-creating the magic of a great live performance in a recorded context is the challenge of the producer and the engineer in the studio. This art has evolved and changed dramatically over the last fifty years. Now computer technology has revolutionized the audio recording world, and is available to anyone at very little cost compared to the industrial equipment of the past. But does wondrous technology mean great recordings?

Only with a comprehensive knowledge of the engineering and production techniques that have evolved over many decades, can someone take this amazing technology and create equally amazing recordings. This workshop is designed to familiarize you with the tools, and arm you with the skills, to make recorded music come alive.

In this introductory course we will address a wide variety of production and engineering techniques including:

The producer/musician interface
Composition and song arranging
Instrumental arranging
Types of microphones and microphone placement techniques
Types of microphone preamps
Software recording platforms Logic and ProTools, their strengths and weaknesses
Compositional techniques made possible by digital recording
Composing and recording using virtual and sampled sounds
Monitoring systems

And time allowing:

An overview of the future of digital recording including 5.1 surround mixing and monitoring