Studio!

I haven't posted here in a while and felt I should update this thread on what I have been doing lately.

In my last post I mentioned about doing work experience at a recording studio for two weeks. This went quite well, I stayed at my uncles house for the week and went back to my house at the weekend. It was not quite what most people would expect from a recording studio, they are client based, where someone will come in and request an album be made. Sometimes it is for movie soundtracks, sometimes video games, you get the picture.

They have about five people working there, with four producing the music and one handling the business side of it. Some of the stuff I heard them make was quite uninteresting, but that was due to the content they were creating, for instance at the time they were working on making on a children's story CD. However, some other work that they had done was astonishing, given that there were only four people, with a guitar, MIDI keyboards and their voices. They mostly did things all by themselves like this, however they occasionally get in musicians to help them. For instance with their latest project, that I expect is finished by now, is a greatest hits of David Bowie album played by a string quartet. For this project they employed a quartet for a day or two and got them to do many takes of 18 or so songs. Once they had gone, and the people at the studio took all the takes and played around with them, combining the best takes of each song and editing them where necessary to create the best sounding track possible.

This was what went on there, now to get back to the subject, I didn't have so much to do there, I spent some of the time doing some more business orientated things, doing spreadsheet and research work to use for album publishing purposes, I directed a session when they were recording a portion of vocals on a track, I helped set up microphones, otherwise, I sat around in the control room and observed what went on, occasionally giving them input in changes they had made to tracks.

Over all, it was a great experience, I was around the right people if I had questions to ask about sound engineering, it was an interesting insight into the business side of the sound engineering world and and it will also help greatly with my personal statement for university!
In addition, when I emailed the owner of the business to thank him for the experience, I mentioned how much I liked the sound of the David Bowie string quartet album they were producing while I was there, and in the reply, he said that he would send me a copy of it!


Thinking about it, I actually have no recollection what I have done over the last month or so, it's all slipped into one big phase i'd call "doing fuck all". So considering the fact that I don't remember the last month, the other big events that have gone on are AS results day and my dad's 60th birthday yesterday.
I will probably write about my AS results in another post, and discuss my dad's birthday for now.

We had some friends of the family round last weekend to celebrate with us. My parent's have known them since they went to art college so as expected they are very close friends.
On Saturday, we went out to to the to Poole for a birthday meal, and stopped off at a beach on the way. Not all went to plan however;
We drove off in the morning and stopped off at Corfe for a little wander around and had a quick cup of tea. I say quick, but our guests were so damn indecisive about where to go for a cup of tea so we ended up staying there for a quite a while. After this, we drove off to Tyneham bay to go down to the beach. It took a little while to walk down there so we only had around half an hour down at the beach. My parents went for a quick swim in the sea, our guests took another ten minutes to walk down and I walked up to the top of the cliffs. As were about to leave, one of our guests slipped over and fell on a rock. To cut to the chase, they had broken their collar bone. We didn't know this at the time, but she eventually managed to get up the hill back to the car. Then we decided to cancel the meal and head back to Salisbury hospital to get her checked up. So there went our plans.

The next day, she spent the day at home and my parents and her husband went up the cathedral spire. In the evening we had a special meal, consisting of steaks and salad. This was great and made up for the mishaps of the previous night. After this we had a fig cake that our guests had baked for my dad, which was lovely. It wasn't the best birthday for him, but we did our best and personally, I would feel that it had worked out in the end.