dguidry wrote on Fri, 02 February 2007 21:15 |
Your sarcasm is ironic. WWW.Soundtraining.com educates some of the world's best at sucking the life out the artistry of music, the D.J. Before you critisize the use of plugins to accomplish what many are doing by buying the most expensive mastering hardware in the world, look first at what you have contributed to the industry of music.
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Maybe I should have phrased that better...
I didn't mean to suggest that a plugin can't do the job! I'm sure the plugin will do exactly what it says on the tin... I'm not a fan of waves' stuff, to be fair, but they work for many people, and their limiters work better at their task than the vast majority of outboard limiters. I'll use mainly DSP, and the only thing analogue I'll tend to use are nice pres, and EQs...
I just object to adding ridiculous amounts of bands to limiters... The law of diminishing returns kicked in along time ago... It's like Gillette bringing out a five blade razor...
And you make an assumption on what I teach. I don't teach people to be DJs! The DJ course is not an STC core course, it's taught in the night by a couple of the tutors here because we need to keep the college running - good music production education is loss making - we charge students 5k in second year and give them something like 20k's worth of studio time each, so in order to keep the music production courses going, we either have to 1/ Cut down the quality and hands on time, or 2/ run other courses on the side to subsidise the production students. If the website gives the impression that the DJ course is a major course, I'll change that... But hey, DJs will always exist, but surely the world is better off with DJs that know the principles of sound, and understand a bit about the music production process?
I teach music tech, and production. i.e. I educate people in the limitations of current technology, both analogue and digital - what it can't do as well as what it can, and try to get them to think about how they can make it better. We also look at the limitations of current productions, and get them thinking about how to make better recordings/mixes/masters than are out there today. Hell, I just did a class where we pointed out all the flaws that managed to get past through the mastering of the new album by the band currently with the number 2 single in the Billboard 100... (it's an over-polished mix but it's amazing what got through... check out the terrible plosive on track seven... HOW DID TED JENSEN LET THAT GO!!??? my guys fixed it in two seconds...)
If we can have students who at the end of the course won't be happy with any producion they do unless they feel it's better than the current best productions on the market, then I'm happy I'm contributing to the music industry...
Strangely it's very hard to get students to think this way. Its amazing how many engineers in Ireland simply aim for their latest recording to be better than their last recording, rather than to pick the best production they've ever heard, and try and beat it! People are just scared of getting a reality check and just like to stick their head in the sand. It takes a lot of beatings to get people to actually aim for better than the mediocre.
Hope this better explains our philosophy...
-Fergal