About Audio

Audio is a peculiar field. It isn't any kind of academic discipline, and so there's little formal training available (compared to, say, graphics or technical writing). To make it even worse, most work in audio turns out to be interdisciplinary, which is a serious bummer in many college departments.

Most college-level audio and recording engineering programs are offered, oddly enough, in Music Departments. This is because Recording Engineering isn't really engineering, and the people who want to study it (you, f'rinstance) want to make music, not do engineering. However, much of the craft used in Audio and Recording Engineering is drawn from science and engineering (most notably acoustical physics, electrical engineering and computer science), so many Music Department people tend to regard that part of the craft with significant fear and loathing. Generally, the training is usually targeted at job roles like "recording engineer" so instruction takes on the character of vocational work: "This is how you place a condenser microphone near a snare drum, Joey. Any questions?" The science and the music co-exist sort of uneasily in the background, and the electrical engineering part of it (working with electronic circuits) is often dispensed with altogether.

Just so you know, even the Audio Engineering Society itself is a little confused about the discipline, and there seems to be a debate going on at the Board of Governors level about just who should be allowed to call themselves an "audio engineer!"

All this may be a little removed from what you want to accomplish. You just want to make really cool recordings, and you've figured out it makes sense to study the subject in order to get a leg up. You want to learn the science behind recording and the technical craft, and you want to learn the moves, like how to make really good recordings, including miking, recording, mixing, synthesizing, editing, signal-processing, producing, preproducing, postproducing, tracking, overdubbing, dubbing and mastering. Whew! Not only that, you'd like to get a job!

This is why the various recording programs teach job roles. It actually makes good sense, and it can be a useful platform for learning how to learn, given the right teachers.

The Time Problem

The time you take to get educated is an important consideration here. Our field is changing so fast that the four-year degree, by definition, makes much of the equipment and practices that are current when you start your training obsolete by the time you graduate! Short courses are less ham-strung by this, if the outfit offering the training can afford to keep changing the hardware!

So, keep in mind that things are changing fast! You have to take everything you learn with a grain of salt, privately assessing just how long you think each factoid and skill-bit is going to be true/useful and continually testing all the bits and pieces that you learn against this rapid rate of change. By the way, this hyperactive rate of change in technology and industry practice is now a permanent feature of our educational landscape. Welcome to perpetual obsolescence!

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