Everyone remembers the performers, producers and lyricists who work on making a song. But what about those who are more hidden in the music-making process? This is the life of an audio engineer. These individuals are crucial to the post-recording production process but often do not receive enough recognition for their work. An audio engineer bears the responsibility of mixing and mastering recordings; they are the technical sound experts who help polish and refine musical recordings, turning them into catchy hits that listeners cannot get enough of.
(KENNETH HARMS//USED WITH PERMISSION)
“A lot of it is cleaning up and finding a goal for what you want the audio to sound like,” Kenneth Harms (12) said. “It is listening very closely, seeing what sounds wrong and what sounds good, and trying to fix the wrong things [while keeping] the good things.”
For Harms, audio engineering became a recent hobby. Audio engineering piqued his interest after a friend invited him to watch the recording of her album.
“One of my friends was recording an album of hers, so she invited me to come and kind of watch what they were doing,” Harms said. “I never really knew what studio work looked like, but that gave me a really good glimpse of how much goes into post-production from recording, and just how much work there is to do with audio aside from the performance.”
For others like Andrew Stroud (12), music has always been an integral part of his life. He began playing the guitar at a very young age, which strengthened his connection with music. His stepfather, who was also an audio engineer, worked at Minglewood Hall, and a young Stroud often tagged along. Growing up in a studio, watching music come to fruition was a catalyst for his decision to pursue a career in music production.
“I’ve been going to [Minglewood Hall] since I was a little kid,” Stroud said. “I became really good friends with the sound engineer and he got me into [sound engineering].”
While their creativity manifests in different ways, Harms and Stroud are both involved with the two main processes of audio engineering: mixing and mastering. Mixing is the process of blending individual tracks from the recording together. Mastering, the final stage of post-recording production, involves cleaning up the audio to ultimately find the “perfect” sound.
“Mixing is the first [step], which is where, essentially, you take all of the tracks that you’ve recorded and you clean them up,” Harms said. “You wanna make sure that each instrument finds their own space of sound … Then you go into mastering, which involves more of the artistic detail. That’s where you get with the artist who wrote [the] song and you mess around with the big-picture [elements].”
Audio engineering has paved a future career path for both Harms and Stroud. Harms plans to study at the University of Memphis, majoring in Radio Technology. Stroud plans to go out of state and attend the Atlanta Institute of Music and Technology with a major in Applied Science in Music Production and Audio, along with a minor that keeps him close to his roots: Guitar Music and Technology. Both have attributed the supportive music community, their respective musical backgrounds and learning resources to their continued passion for this aspect of music production. It has shaped and developed how they perceive their musical environments.
“[Audio engineering] gives you a much wider range of music inspiration to pick from … it’s really inspiring to be there in the studio and it helps you write a lot of stuff that you wouldn’t typically write,” Stroud said. “You also get a lot of inspiration from the musicians and producers that are there … [and] there is nothing but support [in the studio] … [The professionals] are extremely knowledgeable and can really help you. They want the younger people to be inspired and keep going.”
(ANDREW STROUD//USED WITH PERMISSION)
