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So Ya Wanna Learn About Audio
A Reformed But Unrepentant Teacher Tells All
By David Moulton
The Urge . . .
Every now and then we all get the urge to stop faking and get some formal training. Maybe we feel stifled or stuck in our recording work. Maybe we've decided it's time to get serious and make a career out of audio, or music, or some related subject. Maybe our parents are on our case about doing something with our life for a change. Could be we're considering going to college. Or maybe we're in college and beginning to think we aren't all that interested in political science after all, while the band we're in is really beginning to crank and after the last gig, where the producer visiting from LA said . . . .
Anyway, we figure it would be really cool to really know this stuff, so that we could make really cool recordings 'n music, instead of just guessing and fooling around with it. And of course we'd dig getting a real job in the industry, maybe become a producer, work for a major label, go on tour, work in films, who knows? The first step seems to be getting to a point where we know enough that somebody'll actually hire us to do what we really like doing! It's a nice fantasy. Fortunately, it can, on occasion, become reality.
As we get to thinking about it, the first questions that come up are where do we go to get training and exactly what kind of training should we really be getting? If we send off for literature from all the places that advertise in the recording mags, we get back some fairly glitzy brochures pitching short professional/vocational courses, usually aimed at giving us enough chops to get an entry-level job in an established full-service studio. The tuition is often a little heart-stopping, and various unkind folks may suggest to us that the courses are a rip-off, that what we really need is college, what we really need is physics, what we really need is music, what we really need is a job, that you can't learn this stuff, that you can't get a job in the field, that you can get a job but can't make any money in the field, etc., etc.
It's all a little confusing, daunting and discouraging, and it sure makes making a decision tougher. What's a body to do?
What Is Education?
I've been teaching this stuff since about 1970! (Egad!) I've taught courses in my own commercial studio, and I've had my own little school, complete with ads in Rolling Stone and a thoroughly disreputable dormitory. I've taught in a bunch of different colleges (too many to list) and a bunch of different departments (Music, Physics, Journalism, Mass Communications, Music Production and Engineering, Continuing Education, etc.). I've even fallen far enough from grace to become, y'know, an administrator - one of those guys that makes stupid smarmy speeches at student meetings every now and then and explains how everything is cool even when it isn't, or else will be cool, sometime long after you've finished with the stupid place! Hey! I've even taught in Junior High School! Naturally, I have some ideas on the subject.
Simply put, formal training (education) is accelerated experience, learning that permits you to skip the time-consuming process of "learning-by-doing." You don't have to reinvent the wheel. The theory is, it's cheaper to pay somebody to tell you about the wheel than to reinvent it yourself. So, education can be thought of as actively and quickly learning about the stuff that you want to know about rather than waiting to pick it up on the job. And there are some jobs you just don't want to learn by trial 'n error (medicine and aviation spring quickly to mind!).
There's also a more basic goal to education: learning how to learn. The theory is that the act of learning is what you should really learn while you're getting trained. It is what permits you to leapfrog past those poor unfortunates still busy reinventing the wheel (it takes them quite a while, you see!). They may have saved time and money up front by skipping the training, but you can usually blaze right past 'em a couple of years later because of your enhanced knowledge and, more importantly, your enhanced ability to acquire knowledge. These are what you get from education, if it all works the way it's supposed to. You can pay a lot now or even more later.
Meanwhile, keep in mind that learning isn't easy. The first learning step, deciding you need to learn some particular thing and setting out to do it, isn't too hard. The next step, getting confused, is a corker. As you step off the cliff into the learning of something new, by definition you abandon "what you know." This is replaced by what I think of as a "confusion zone." And until you get there and find that you are lost, you aren't learning anything new! If you take a course and never get confused, you're wasting your time and tuition dollars! I suspect that it's the process of resolving all the confusion that leads to your actual learning. Meanwhile, it's really hard while you're confused. This seems to get worse as you get older, especially if you haven't bothered to try serious learning for a while. I was surprised to find out just how tough it was when I decided to take up learning again. You'd think, me being a teacher and all, I'd know all about this stuff. But (and this seems to be a common problem for older teachers and administrators), I had given learning up in order to be a department chairman at Berklee, and I'd forgotten how difficult the task really is!
This "confusion zone" leads to much of the discomfort and anxiety that occurs while you are learning and getting educated. However, as you get used to being confused, it gets better. You can actually get to enjoy, sort of, the period of confusion (I suspect it's an acquired taste) - it's a little like being stoned or high. Enjoy it or not, you should keep doing it, because it is essential to your professional well-being. Hell, it's probably essential to your long-term mental health - some of the work on Alzheimer's Disease suggests that active learners (who are the ones going around getting confused by things) are less susceptible to the Alzheimer's. You should maintain your mental and physical learning capacity by ongoing conditioning, just like physical exercise. A puzzle a day keeps the brain rot away! Or something like that.
So What Do I Do? Where Do I Go?
There are lots of types of training for adults. Beyond the so-called "elementary/secondary educational experience," about half the adults in this country go on to some sort of college training. The range of higher education is quite large, from extremely pragmatic vocational courses in community colleges and "professional" schools, to generalized multifaceted learning in "liberal arts" colleges, to highly advanced graduate studies in a mind-bending array of specialties.
In addition, there are lots of "short courses," mostly taught by private outfits, that fall outside of the higher education establishment. These tend to focus on specific disciplines and crafts, everything from "Getting Along With Your Boss, For Secretaries" to "Diesel Fuel Injection Systems in Marine Engines." The music and recordings fields are rich in such offerings.
Finally, there is an old-fashioned sort of training called "the apprenticeship." Instead of going to school, you go to work as an apprentice (i.e. an untrained assistant) for an established expert in the field you wish to specialize in. The theory is that you will acquire your mentor's skills as you work under him or her while they do their professional work. "Internships" are short-term apprenticeships sponsored by a school as a part of formal training.
Now all of these approaches have validity. Which is best for you depends on a lot of factors, including your age, the amount of money you have, the financial commitments you already have, your goals, and your self-image. There is no single best or worst way to get training. In a perfect world, you'd do some of each!
Personally, just so you know, I'm a big fan of liberal arts college education. I think it's seriously undersold and underappreciated, and if you've got the time, money and inclination it can turn out to be the most valuable training you can get, in the long run. I went to a fairly high-powered and very liberal arts college (Bard College) and to a very high-powered music school (Juilliard School of Music). I feel the Bard education was significantly superior (by which I mean more useful and practical, even in many areas of music) to the Juilliard education. However, the Juilliard experience had some unexpected and unique values which I will discuss later.
About Audio
Audio is a peculiar field. It isn't any kind of academic discipline, and so there's little formal training available (compared to, say, graphics or technical writing). To make it even worse, most work in audio turns out to be interdisciplinary, which is a serious bummer in many college departments.
Most college-level audio and recording engineering programs are offered, oddly enough, in Music Departments. This is because Recording Engineering isn't really engineering, and the people who want to study it (you, f'rinstance) want to make music, not do engineering. However, much of the craft used in Audio and Recording Engineering is drawn from science and engineering (most notably acoustical physics, electrical engineering and computer science), so many Music Department people tend to regard that part of the craft with significant fear and loathing. Generally, the training is usually targeted at job roles like "recording engineer" so instruction takes on the character of vocational work: "This is how you place a condenser microphone near a snare drum, Joey. Any questions?" The science and the music co-exist sort of uneasily in the background, and the electrical engineering part of it (working with electronic circuits) is often dispensed with altogether.
Just so you know, even the Audio Engineering Society itself is a little confused about the discipline, and there seems to be a debate going on at the Board of Governors level about just who should be allowed to call themselves an "audio engineer!"
All this may be a little removed from what you want to accomplish. You just want to make really cool recordings, and you've figured out it makes sense to study the subject in order to get a leg up. You want to learn the science behind recording and the technical craft, and you want to learn the moves, like how to make really good recordings, including miking, recording, mixing, synthesizing, editing, signal-processing, producing, preproducing, postproducing, tracking, overdubbing, dubbing and mastering. Whew! Not only that, you'd like to get a job! This is why the various recording programs teach job roles. It actually makes good sense, and it can be a useful platform for learning how to learn, given the right teachers.
The Time Problem
The time you take to get educated is an important consideration here. Our field is changing so fast that the four-year degree, by definition, makes much of the equipment and practices that are current when you start your training obsolete by the time you graduate! Short courses are less ham-strung by this, if the outfit offering the training can afford to keep changing the hardware!
So, keep in mind that things are changing fast! You have to take everything you learn with a grain of salt, privately assessing just how long you think each factoid and skill-bit is going to be true/useful and continually testing all the bits and pieces that you learn against this rapid rate of change. By the way, this hyperactive rate of change in technology and industry practice is now a permanent feature of our educational landscape. Welcome to perpetual obsolescence!
Colleges
If a college degree is on your mind, prepare yourself to spend a batch of time and money at it! Fortunately, Bachelor's degrees are fairly useful. They prove you have enough grit to successfully persevere at a complex array of tasks called courses (many of which seem loony and only distantly related to your goals) over a four-year period, getting them all done in spite of mind-numbing rules, bizarre regulations and endless other impediments, like pissant professors, crummy equipment, complaining girl/boyfriends, and abject poverty. Your reward? The Bachelor's degree is reasonably widely accepted as a credential of capability. It implies that you actually know some stuff and can be trusted to get other useful stuff done with reasonably acceptable quality. You can get a job with a Bachelor's degree, and the skills you acquired through the above four-year torture-test will help you successfully cope with, dare I say it, "the real world!"
Interestingly, your degree major doesn't matter too much in the final analysis. However, we do learn best while studying what we're really interested in, and professionally it does make sense that we should major in something related to our interests. This is why degree programs in recording engineering or audio make sense for those of us reading Recording Magazine. However, while you are wading through a degree program, you should also make absolutely sure you pick up some math, computer skills, acoustics, and general business. You would also be wise to grab at least one foreign language. You'll never get a better chance!
Graduate degrees in audio are of limited usefulness right now, unless you decide you wish to teach (for which you are definitely gonna need advanced degrees) and/or you get really curious about the subject. In such cases, graduate study is essential.
As far as what kind of colleges are best, there are two opposing criteria: educational quality vs. professional visibility.
The first has to do with the general quality of the education you get. As I mentioned above, my experience is that liberal arts education is the best way to go, so I think you might be smart to pick the best liberal arts college you can find that has a halfway decent audio program. State schools can be bargains here because of their low tuitions. However, because such schools spend much of their lives as political footballs, you run the risk of arriving on campus just after they've been punted once again by their friendly state legislature. Said punt can really diminish the quality of your education. Private and independent schools, on the other hand, tend to be a little more stable but lots more expensive, and the toney ones don't offer audio (hey, the really toney ones don't like to offer anything that might lead directly to a job!). With all that said, you can find private and public colleges and universities that offer solid training in recording while also giving you a strong general education. My thinking is: if you're gonna spend four years at it, you might as well really load up on stuff!
The opposing criterion I mentioned above has to do with your professional life after college. This is where "professional" schools offer an edge. As I mentioned, Juilliard's training wasn't so hot outside of it's specialties: ear training, music performance and lessons, and I felt the same was true at Berklee. Actually, I suspect this is endemic to all stand-alone music conservatories and probably most professional and technical schools as well (MIT may be an exception). However, while the "learning-how-to-learn" part of the training in such schools may be deficient, the professional contacts you make in such schools often make up for it, turning out to be immensely valuable, as does the cachet of having gone to such places. There is a network, and if you can lay claim to membership in it, it can sure help when you are out there trying to make your way through the professional jungle. For me, even though it seems cynical, the value of having been educated in the same classes with numerous people who have ended up being "big names" may be as important professionally as the quality of the education I got. (My Juilliard degree has opened doors well beyond what its actual educational quality deserves!) The deciding point about this has to do with your goals. Do you want to be a star? a big name? work in major studios? on major projects? Then you might be well advised to join "the club," and the initiation fee is usually tuition at a school with a strong professional reputation. If you are more interested in other aspects of the field, where connections and contacts aren't as important, then you may be able to ignore that consideration with little loss, and concentrate instead on educational quality in place of star visibility.
Short Courses
College is time-consuming and expensive. It may not be the best way for you. Hey, it may be out of the question. An alternative is the so-called "short course," an intensive period of applied training at a private facility. The glitziest of such programs, in this country, seems to be Full Sail, and there are a range of similar programs available around the world. In general, such courses are comparatively expensive for the amount of time they offer, but they are also comparatively intense. You can cover a lot of ground in ten weeks of twelve-hour days!
What such courses really give you is an intense experience within the field. That experience can be really valuable and useful, and can give you much of the leg up that you desire. You will learn a lot of jargon, a lot of process, and much about current industry practices and standards. What you won't get, of course, is depth, and you won't have time to learn how to learn. If you already have these things, fine. If you don't, keep in mind you're going to have to do them on your own either before or after you take a short course.
On Your Own
You can, of course, teach yourself. Particularly if you set aside some of the money you would spend on tuition for college or a short course to buy books, equipment, magazine subscriptions, and the like, you can give yourself a pretty decent education. Also, you can sign up for seminars and go to conventions and learn a heap for very little money. (For instance, I find the AES conventions an extraordinarily intense learning experience every year. Tuition is about $100, and books (preprints) are another $100. This is an incredible bargain, if you think of it as an alternative to college!)
What you are going to have trouble with, while learning on your own, is both the perspective and structure of more formal training. And you never get a diploma, which can be a serious disadvantage in our label-crazed society. Against these deficiencies, one of the huge benefits of self-education is that you really learn how to learn. You learn how to provide your own intellectual structure, discipline, facilities, and direction. You will acquire a level of self-reliance and confidence, as you teach yourself, that will serve you immensely well in your future professional work.
Finally, learning on your own is what you have to do after you finish all the other training, in any case, so you might as well get on with it.
UHK: The University of Hard Knocks
Here we're talking about just going out and getting a dumb 'ol job in the business and learning by doing. This is the time-honored way. Working your way up from Hanging Out to Slave to Gopher to Assistant Studio Office Manager to Assistant Engineer to Engineer to Producer to President to Ruler Of The Universe! The theory is that you learn on the job. And because it's the real world, you learn the really important stuff, not some stupid theoretical junk that some egghead professor who's never soldered an XLR in his life is spouting in some ivory-tower classroom. The best part of it is that you are getting paid for it. You are getting an education on OPM (Other People's Money)!
There is, of course, a lot to be said for this. It works best, of course, if you already have learned how to learn. The problem is that your on-the-job learning is restricted to the range of your job (soldering XLRs?), and to the restricted vision and limitations of your boss (who may never have completed eighth grade and may be a turkey, besides). I've noticed a defensiveness among UHK graduates - they often aren't sure how much they know, and sometimes resent others who may have more extended training. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that you sometimes find it harder to get promoted than some guy coming in with lots of degrees 'n stuff. The UHK diploma doesn't count for very much, except among other UHK alums.
As a result, you'll do best with UHK training if you combine it with learning on your own, a short course, and/or some college. Don't just entrust your learning to your job. Learn everything you can from your job, but also go beyond it, seeking out every possible opportunity to expand on what you know.
Commencement For Fun And Profit
In the real world, you never graduate. You just keep learning. As you learn, your knowledge of your limitations keeps increasing so that, paradoxically, as you learn more and more you will find that you know less and less!
At the same time, education works! The more you learn, the more successful you will become. The benefits of education keep accruing throughout your life, in terms of money, success and life quality.
Meanwhile, the recording field is fiercely interdisciplinary: you need to know science, psychology, math, music, basic engineering, and you've got to have patience, endurance, tolerance, ears, humor, and lots of judgment. These don't come quick, they don't come easy. You'll need to keep working and working on them, probably for the rest of your life or at least until your next career change!
Beyond audio, everything else is changing too. Life's a moving target. You'll change jobs lots of times, careers a couple of times, and your place in and perspective of life will change as you age (yes, Virginia, aging happens to all of us and from all reports beats the alternative!). Adapting to those changes successfully is a central part of what education is all about, sort of like learning to dance on ice floes. You'll never really be educated. So, take on as many of the educational possibilities I've discussed above as you possibly can. At various times, in various places, all of them are the right way to do things.
Happy diplomas!
*****
Dave Moulton is generally confused, and learning to enjoy it. He also enjoys confusing students wherever he can find them, most notably, these days, at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and Emerson College in Boston. (that was 1995 - now I teach privately, for fun!)
- Moulton Laboratories and Digital Media Services
Groton, MA 01450
978-448-6828, fax: 448-6851
dmoulton@ma.ultranet.com
http://www.moultonlabs.com
- Copyright 1997 by David Moulton. All rights reserved.
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