j.w.

It's a peculiar time to get into the music biz... it's about half the size it was 13 years ago, & it doesn't look like it's going to start growing again until premium streaming really takes hold, which won't be for several years. Studios are biting the dust left & right, it's not as easy to get a solid apprenticeship as it used to be.

I'd say your best bet is to become a kickass editor. Because pretty much all bands suck these days, & the ones that don't only record at a handful of studios. Everyone thinks they can just come in & do a sloppy take & have the engineer fix it in Logic/Pro Tools. And no one at the studio wants to do the tedious ****. It takes like 20 seconds to align a drum track perfectly, but it sounds mechanical. It takes hours to align a drum track just enough that it sounds good, but not so much that it loses it's feel. If you get good enough that you can nail that sort of thing, & you're willing to put in the hours doing the mind numbingly tedious ****, you become invaluable to a lazy producer. And they're all pretty lazy. And if you can get in that way, you'll learn the rest.

It's a lot like graphic design, there's a lot more people going to school for it than there is a need for it. Most people won't end up using their degree, & the ones that do will mostly be doing work for ****ty garage bands & will hate it. The way to get ahead is to learn to recognize the groove, & always be positive & pay attention to details & work harder than everyone else, & don't be incompetent. The rest of the stuff will come on it's own. And develop your personal skills, talk to people & make friends, as many as you can without being douche. There's not really a place in the music industry for quiet people who expect to be recognized or who wait for opportunities to appear. But no one wants to be around a douche, either. Be sincere with people. And be confident, but always be humble, so people will teach you.

And watch a ton of DVD's. Watch the Todd Dowd film, the Language of Music. And all of the Classic Albums series. Most of that stuff is on Netflix. You'll absorb a lot of the intangibles, what artists are looking for out of their engineer & what makes a great song. And the new Dave Grohl film is really good, Sound City, even though it's about analog recording. There's a lot in there about the studio environment & what not. No one really came into that studio knowing anything about recording, everyone just worked their way up from sweeping the floors on an apprenticeship model & that just bred great engineers.

Good luck. I've got friends who are ridiculously talented & now they just do live sound, & I've got friends that I never thought were particularly great musicians & now they're working on Grammy-winning records & scoring major films. And the difference between them is their character, I think.

__________________
[links removed by mod, no advertising]