| Aka Nameless wrote on Tue, 25 July 2006 00:40 |
I love this guy.. 
Back on topic, any other ME's have stories of their beginning to share?
|
Hi Colin -
I started out by cleaning out toilet bowls and making cassette tape dupes working as an assistant at a studio in Baltimore a couple years after I graduated from Berklee after focusing on performance and composition (and not engineering) while I was there. This was in 1991 and the studio was one of the first in the area to get a new fangled thing - a Digidesign Sound Designer II workstation - and for some reason I was instantly attracted to the options that digital editing gave, and even more for some reason really liked focusing on mastering, and learned this system fairly quickly by coming in during down time and sitting in with the other engineers there. Because processing speed was so slow back in those days the studio actually needed someone to stay late nights fairly often when work on a deadline came in - so that you could take over from the day engineer, do the next set of edits and then hit the button to process, wait an hour or more, and then repeat until morning came. The place became fairly busy doing editing and pre-mastering to DAT using the SDII, a couple Yamaha DMP-7's and a couple dbx comps, and I ended up being given more and more of these jobs to do. Invaluable for me at this time was getting to get direct feedback from the other much more experienced engineers there as to how close to the mark I was or what other approaches to do.
A few years later the place went out of business after an under capitalized expansion was attempted - but by this point in 1994 I ended up getting the original version of SAW and setting up a small digital editing studio at my own place and continued to do editing, recording and pre-mastering work there on my own for a number of cients.
In 1997 I moved to NYC, did a brief stint selling pro audio gear at Manny's (such as you are doing now), and then ended up getting a job as a production assistant at a CD and vinyl record replicator, Europadisk. I was soon promoted to supervising the production for the entire vinyl pressing dept. and worked in this capacity, while also maintaining my own digital based home studio, until 2002. At this point I quit Europadisk to open my own business, where I did short run duplication, brokered larger replication orders, and more and more "budget" mastering using at what was at that point an all digital processing chain. Very fortunately I was able to develop a lot of repeat business from clients grateful to have an option that was within their budgets that was giving them still clearly audible improvements on their mixes.
In 2004 the previous long term mastering engineer at Europadisk quit to move on to working at another facility, and based on the owner's trust of my abilities and my recent experiences at my own business, I was hired back at Europadisk to replace him. I was trained by the president of the company, Jim Shelton, who was a fine mastering engineer in his own right with some 30 years of experience, directly for a few months to learn the art of cutting vinyl masters using one of the few operating DMM lathes in the world, and luckily was able to quickly pick this skill up to the point where I was doing unsupervised work cutting vinyl masters every day almost immediately. During this time I used most of every bit of surplus from my salary to aquire more mastering equipment of my own (such as a Medici eq and Lavry Blue DAC's) as I wanted the studio to be able to ultimately compete with the best in NYC , and also being aware of the companies financial problems, to have my own gear to open up a studio with in case the place closed. While at Europadisk I got to work on a number of "name" projects and learned a ton by getting to work on multiple orders every day. Again, also invaluable for me during this time was getting to consult on mastering philosophy and approach with another more experienced engineer.
Due to a number of factors Europadisk closed in July 2005, and since then I've been building up my own room here in Greenpoint Brooklyn, reopening my business now focusing primarily on mastering - now with a much better selection of gear including B&W 802s and an analog process chain, and have been doing work for a number of clients since March.
So - while there are a ton of other ME's that have a lot more experience than me out there - I also feel lucky in that over the years I've had the opportunity to work and observe directly with other ME's instead of just having to grope through only internet boards infotainment and mythologizing and figuring things out strictly on my own.
Having said that - as long as you are making people feel happy with your work, and as long as you're honest with them as far as what you offer and can meet the expectations based on this - and as long as the client finds the price reasonable - then go for it - I'd say you're ready to charge for your work at that point.
As other's have stated - don't expect to get rich (or even more than subsistence) from this - instead do it because you simply don't want to do anything else - work on your people skills first, your room & monitoring chain second, and your processing chain finally - then you'll most likely do good.
Best regards,
Steve Berson
