Stephen Montoya
Its go time at the recording studio inside the Marjorie Alkek Fine Arts Building located on the south end of the Weatherford College campus on a sunny but cool Tuesday morning. As a quartet of jazz musicians begin to unpack their instruments, a group of young and eager audio engineering students are busy prepping for the upcoming recording session.
“We set up for this the night before,” audio engineering program grad Austin Choate says while looking at the leads running across the floor. Before Choate took this course, which is now in its second year, he says he never realized how much manual labor was involved in setting everything up for a recording session. “Sometimes, we have people coming in, in a matter of hours and we have to think quickly about how we are going to make that happen.”
Choate is one of a dozen students who took the very first audio engineering course at Weatherford College last year. This program and its curricula are a culmination and brainchild of dean of Fine Arts Duane Durrett, and music instructor Fredrick Sanders.
Students who attend this course can achieve a one-year certificate or take the two-year program to earn an associate degree in Applied Science (AAS) in audio engineering. Besides the academia achieved in this program, students will gain the tools they need to understand the workflow of a recording studio. These skills include sound fundamentals, tracking, editing, mixing audio, how to set up a studio for a recording session, and much more.
“It took me about a year to get the program approved,” Durrett says in regard to this program’s inception. “We had to prove that there will be jobs for the students once they completed the course.”
Durrett verified that there is a definite demand for audio engineers with stats pointing to a 19.93% increase in the fields of audio and video techs not just in Texas but nationwide over the next few years.
Stephen Montoya
Weatherford College Audio Engineering class grad, Austin Choate preps the sound levels for a scheduled recording session.
“Once students in this program are done, they can go to work and make around 50,000 bucks a year,” he says. “That’s not bad for a two-year degree.” Also, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, audio engineer jobs are expected to grow at a rate of nine percent over the next six years.
After proving this program’s academic relevance to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Durrett says the Bob Kingsley Blue Stem Studio, which is across the street from the college campus, was basically set aside for the school to use.
“We got this studio at a very good rate, which was basically an offer we couldn’t refuse,” Durrett says. “It’s been very beneficial for these students to see a working studio in this program.”
The Blue Stem Studio where Durrett and cohorts teach their AE class sessions has hosted such country artists as Jo Dee Messina, Clint Black, and Faith Hill to name a few.
“This program has become very popular since our first run last year,” Durrett verifies. “We're also doing a lot of recording. The quality of our work is as good as anything you'll hear in today’s music industry.”
Besides this local country music connection, Durrett says the current AE class is actually working with the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, editing 40 years’ worth of its recorded sessions. For those of you not familiar with the Bluebird, it’s a place where musicians who are stars or starting out convene to trade songs and sing in the round as a community of songwriters and performers.
“There's people that are now famous that weren't famous when they were trying to make it on these recordings,” Durrett says. “And so, we're editing those shows.”
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Besides learning how to run a sound console and recording session, students in this AE program also learn the theory of songwriting so as to be more understanding of the artists they record.
This is where Sanders contribution to this program enters the picture.
“The first misconception I address in this course is the belief that many students have about needing to learn a system to become a songwriter,” Sanders says. “Then I'll start with a question like this. How are you doing?”
From this prompt, Sanders says he spotlights the fact that anyone who answers this question has already created a unique story that can be used for songwriting subject matter.
“That's the first point that we start with,” he says. “We try to help each student overcome this insecurity of being public, or what I call being present. Once we are able to craft the words and the emotions and the language of being present, it's easier to describe a story in a song because the skill of writing a song is a lot easier than the ability to be open about who you are internally.”
Besides finding their inner songwriter, Sanders says he tries to create an environment where students who can’t read music or have never performed live can feel confident musically. Other questions posed in this six-week section include the classic, what is time? and how can everyone live with compassion?
“We also examine the importance of tragic moments,” he says. “Now, what are you going to do with the experience? What kind of song are you going to write? How are you going to process and create solutions?”
Sanders says his class rubric has other elements, which he calls non-negotiables in music, like rhythm, melody, harmony, tone, and lyrics.
“If it's without text, does the melodic phrase have a lyrical sense to it?” he asks. “Can you see the imagery after hearing the melodic phrase? It's not about my opinion anymore or your opinion. There's something that we all can agree on. So, we challenge the students to be scholarly in their existence.”
Back in the studio, Choate and several AE students continue to check sound levels to make sure everything is connected correctly for the current session.
“Before taking the course, I had maybe an idea as far as what a fader is and what a potential meter is, a general idea of what EQ is, but not exactly how to use those tools,” Choate says. “Now, when I go into movie theaters and I go, ‘this room doesn't sound the way that I thought it would have six years ago. This class has really upped my knowledge in this field."
As far as advice to anyone looking into entering the field of AE work, Choate says “jump right in. If you're going to do it, just go for it.”
