Two part article I wrote for a recording studio client
4 Ways to Annoy Your Sound Engineer
In a recording studio, the most important person in the room is without a doubt the sound engineer. After all, your talent manager may be important but does he know how to operate a mixing board? Is your singer going to be optimizing the sound that you hear when all of the recordings are done and you’re planning a release? I didn’t think so.
Now as a rule of thumb your sound engineer will have worked with all kinds of people in their time and will tolerate a lot from people who don’t understand how complex their job can be, however if you’re really determined to infuriate the person who your recording depends on, we’ve compiled a handy list of pointers for that.
Blaming them for something that was your own fault
Now people make mistakes and nobody’s perfect, however the fact that you are playing sloppy chords and it doesn’t sound great coming out of the speaker is not your engineers fault. Or splitting everybody’s skull by unplugging microphones and instruments before the channel has been muted, yep that’s your fault as well. And your engineer will get sick of your accusations falling on his ability pretty quickly.
Being Far Too Demanding on the Spot
Yes your sound engineer is probably aware that you are the one he’s working for by the way you are shouting instructions at them with little care for courtesy. “Turn up my guitar”. “Okay now we need you to boost the volume on the lead mic”. “Less volume on the drums”. “I know that that feedback has only been happening for all of 2 seconds but its ruining my experience, fix it immediately”. I’m sure you can imagine.
It doesn’t take much too just give your engineer a chance to showcase their own skills and then if things are not suitable then share your concerns with him like they are a human and see what he can do to improve them.
Renaming him as “Hey”
So we’re fairly certain that their mother did not call him his given name at birth only for a rude client to constantly be referring to him as “Hey” or “Excuse me”.
“Hey can you turn my mike up please?” “Excuse me, could you get rid of that feedback?” “Hey I can’t hear my guitar very well, could fix it?”
They have a name, a perfectly good name that doesn’t need changing because you’ve neglected to be a decent human being and take all of 30 seconds to actually ask them what their name is.
These are just a few of the many things that you could easily annoy your next engineer with. We wouldn’t recommend doing that though, unless you want your next hit track to sound d like a bowl of Rice Krispies.
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