Tales of a Tea Boy: The Reality Behind Today's Recording Industry

When you first walk into Lighthouse Studio you are greeted warmly to long corridor adorned with platinum, RIAA-issued records, surely spoils of a long and arduous crusade within the infamous music industry. These records hang proudly showcased like a professor's long sought after doctorate or a soldier's Purple Heart. Record after record praises the same name in a polished chrome luster: Ray Alexander. Yet as you continue your trek down into the control room, it becomes apparent that the best of these trophies are kept inside the control room itself. What Ray values most is not the formal display of industry recognition but rather the sentimental memories encased in an autographed Rolling Stones poster, an old backstage pass, or even greater, a single photograph of a far younger and more youthful Ray Alexander standing in a crowded hallway next to none other than John Lennon himself. I am sure that every morning Ray sits down he takes a very brief second to look up at these frozen memories and remember how far he has come.

Having said that, my short stay with Ray Alexander and Lighthouse Studio has led me to the conclusion that these achievements are not easily won and that it takes a certain type of person to be able to build such a prominent empire out of nothing. Ray has the privilege of having a much sought after job, whose industry faces extinction each and everyday by the Great Equalizer that is the Internet. The role of the music producer has been romanticized in today's popular culture much like the role of the "rock star" has been. We associate this role with an image of a quiet genius teetering over a console of knobs and faders, green and red LEDs, turning something this way, sliding something that way, listening to some divinely-inspired muse trying to get "that sound." You hear about the remarkable and innovative ideas of George Martin, The Beatles' producer, and think of what fun it would be to have such a creative intensive job. I learned my very first day that everything I had come to believe was a fantasy. I suspect that if Ray were to actually spend 4 hours experimenting with a harmonium sound, he would be out of a job the next day. Not only that, but Ray already knows how to get that sound. That is essentially what people are paying him for.

The incredible rise in affordability of recording technology these days makes it possible for almost anybody to run the same software a professional recording facility uses on their Macbook Pro at home. I've witnessed quite a few clients come in with sessions that they had recorded themselves at home and brought in to be touched upon at the studio. While the studio does have a fully acoustically treated room, an impressively expensive collection of vintage microphones and amplifiers, the main asset that the studio has to offer is Ray's experience. What separates Ray from the clients is that he knows exactly what combination of microphone, preamp, compressor, and software plug-in to use for any given situation. This is something that makes his job so extraordinarily unique. This is what makes the recording industry one of the hardest industries to get into.

To get into any other typical career, there almost always exists some linear path of a university education involved. I realize that this is not the case for audio engineering and it never will be. The first reason being that recording technology is changing by the day and a curriculum teaching a version of Pro Tools 7 will become obsolete in Pro Tools 8. Sure, the theories will always remain, but there's always a gap between theory and practice. Secondly, a recent graduate of such a program will find it incredibly difficult to find a job in an already scarce job market. Logically, as a musician, are you going to want a person who just graduated with no experience under their belt or a seasoned veteran who produced several of your favorite records producing yours? Experience is the lubrication necessary to maintain a smooth-flowing session. With a profession so heavily dependent on technology, the ability to problem solve is extremely crucial in those common situations when a microphone fails to pick up any sound. It takes about thirty seconds for a client to become uncomfortably impatient (they are, after all, most often paying by the hour). While the inexperienced engineer stands there, fumbling to replace the microphone and then the microphone cable, Ray heroically strides in, takes control, and in a matter of seconds troubleshoots the problem down to an incorrect patching of the signal flow. He mutters to me under his breath,

"You see, a $15,000 education and they can't even teach basic troubleshooting."

I realized then that the best way into the industry was through that of the Tea Boy. All great recording engineers, much like The Beatles' Geoff Emerick, started off in the same place as I was-getting tea. In my case, this meant getting coffee-and a lot of it. The more I hung around, the more my responsibilities grew. First I was getting coffee, then I was running to the bank, next I was wrapping up cables. Before I knew it, I was beginning to set up microphones, scrambling to make note that a Royer 121 ribbon microphone sounds great through a Vox cabinet speaker and a hollow-body Gretsch guitar. On one occasion, I even had the opportunity to man the large center console but declined out of sheer intimidation. The biggest thing that a school cannot teach an engineer is the most important asset, one that has created considerable reluctance in me to continue in the field, and that is how to deal with clients

One of the many joys that I experienced was the diversity of clients that came through the studio. I rarely ever met the same person twice. While Ray's particular expertise tends to be in Rock and R&B musicians, he caters to anybody he can get; for example, he had clients ranging from spoken word artists to children's music to hip hop and even a 3 piece jazz ensemble. I took great pleasure in being exposed to so many different styles and the changes that were required for each situation. However, there is a very fine art in dealing with people, an art that I haven't necessarily mastered. For the most part, clients usually come into the studio with an idea, a loose framework of goals and expectations, and work with Ray to achieve them. And then you have the small percentage of high maintenance clients who view themselves as artists over anything else. These people are particularly hard to deal with and require you to remain humble. You forget very easily that you are dealing with another person's art, a very personal, creative expression of their self. No matter what the situation is you are required to remain as humble and objective as possible and reserve absolutely all judgments. I find that this is the most difficult thing to do. Another great myth of the record producer is that, through the grace of twisting a knob, they can make anything sound good. It then becomes a very awkward situation when a client comes in assuming that. You can only go into a session with a great sense of hope that the performer will be skillful enough to meet up to their expectations. The most troublesome situation is this: a singer comes in and is flat on every note. They then ask you, "was that a good take?" There's only so many times you can suggest to them to try another take before you realize that they could sing the same line a thousand times and never get it. The singer blames the engineer and the engineer blames the singer and in the end there's nothing either of them can do.

The worst thing I have seen that is increasingly common today is that assumption vocalists bring in that "we can just Autotune it later." Because technology now allows us to take a bad singer and digitally tune each and every note to be in key, the performance of some musicians is decreasing. In the very early beginnings of recording technology, the role of the engineer was simply to put a microphone in a room and capture a performance. It was up to the musician to nail an entire song in one take. This seems absurd today. In the 60's came the technology to overdub separate tracks to form a composite track and thus revolutionized how records were made. Jimi Hendrix could play both rhythm and lead guitar on his records and The Beatles could sing over an entire orchestra. A newfound freedom was created. However, with this freedom for the musician came a new responsibility for the engineers who had to actually then mix these tracks together to create one continuous piece of music. As the technology has increased, the role of the engineer has too and the role of the musician has decreased in the process. I've witnessed firsthand the grueling and monotonous job it takes for an engineer to sit and go through a poorly-recorded vocal track, note by note and adjust each and every line to correct the pitch. In extreme cases, if a track is so drastically out of key, pitch correction produces an effect that makes the singer sound robotic and artificial. Contemporary hip-hop commonly uses this effect intentionally.

When these unpleasant confrontations arise, it is good to be able to pause for a moment and look up at a picture of your younger self standing awkwardly next to John Lennon and remind yourself why it is you are doing what you're doing. At first glance, you might think of Ray Alexander to be a very lucky individual to have succeeded in this extraordinarily difficult industry. However, it comes at a significant price. There were many times where I would come in the morning to find Ray already at his desk, telling me, "I just left this place 5 hours ago." He's been known on occasion to even spend the night. The only time he gets to see any new movies is if somebody brings it on DVD to watch while they are recording. The sacrifice to running your own successful recording studio is that you don't get a single day off. While there are several other engineers employed at the studio, Ray must obsessively oversee everything. Being away from the studio at all seems to create even more anxiety for him. If an engineer fails to patch the signal flow correctly or doesn't know how to deal with a high maintenance client, he's going to potentially lose money. He will always remain forever cursed by the sacrifice of spending time with his family or the anxiety of being away from the studio. This is all just a day in the life of the modern record producer. The romanticized version tends to leave out all of this inner conflict in replace for a glamorized achievement of having a platinum record. It takes a lot more than sheer hard work and determination to get this far. At the end of my short stay behind the curtain, I am left with only one question-is it worth it?

Mark Anthony Cianfrani - Philadelphia, PA
SEO Specialist | Web Copywriter
http://www.markanthonycianfrani.com/

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