Sound engineering

Sound engineering

You may think sound engineering is the bastion of frustrated guitarists or the domain of the hopelessly technological caffeine-head. But those of us at the diva end of the microphone would be lost without sound engineers quietly beavering away behind the scenes to make us sound glorious. So just what do the boys in the back room do?

Sound engineers operate complex electronic equipment to reproduce music, dialog, sound effects, and other audio content to the highest quality. The job is a varied one and not necessarily restricted to musical performance. Sound engineers often work for radio, TV, theater, corporate presentations, promotions, and even websites.

It's a technical job much more akin to lighting engineering than conducting.

Duties can include setting up the studio, setting up and maintaining appropriate sound levels and dynamics, recording each item and instrument, mixing tracks on tape and monitoring the sound using the control room speakers, compiling the recordings into the final master according to the client's brief, and assembling all the information associated with the recording for archive.

'You may find yourself sitting in a dark, dingy church for three days at a time with nothing but a flask of coffee and a bunch of miserable violinists for company'

Hours of work vary widely and frequently include evenings, nights, and weekends. Most of the work is carried out in a recording studio but often people record on location in churches, concert halls or outside. Depending on whether you specialize in live recording or studio recording, there may also be a fair amount of traveling involved and you could get to see some really interesting places along the way. Conversely, you may find yourself sitting in a dark, dingy church for three days at a time with nothing but a flask of coffee and a bunch of miserable violinists for company.

Twenty-six-year-old Ryan Taylor is from Fresno in California but now lives in San Diego. He works as a freelance recording engineer. He wandered into sound engineering quite by chance: 'I was a psychology student at the University of California, San Diego but I started taking recording and music technology courses because I didn't really like psychology very much.

'I ended up taking great courses from extremely talented professors,' he says. 'Those courses were mostly theoretical computer music courses, but they gave me access to the recording studio. I spent many nights in that studio experimenting and learning the basics. Those recordings are completely awful, but they taught me a lot.'

After college Taylor worked as an intern at 'a crappy studio in Los Angeles' before interning at Cue Recording Studios near Washington DC. 'It was a great experience to see how bigger sessions were being run,' he says.

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