About
I am a recovering Recording Engineer. Twenty-eight years in the business, the last twenty-four of them as an Independent Self Employed Recording Engineer. Over the course of those years, I’ve enjoyed a fair degree of success, although I never got as far as I’d hoped to. I envisioned myself receiving multiple Grammys for albums I would get to record. While I certainly did get to work on projects which received Grammys, I never received one for my Engineering prowess. That’s ok. I have no regrets on the career I chose… it has been a great ride. It has been an incredible experience being able to earn a living doing the very thing that I love more than any other job I’ve ever had. Not everyone gets to do that. I’ve been very blessed.
In the late 1990’s, I started to see a lot of changes moving in on the music and recording industries. Lots of changes, some independent of each other, and some which were closely related to and which fed each other. All of them, however, started to make it far more difficult to earn a living in the recording business. In this blog, I hope to spell out what some of those changes were, look at where they came from, and explore exactly what effect they’ve had on this business.
At the beginning of 2007, for the first time in my career I was faced with having to get a day job in order to survive. I have always known that I was extremely blessed when I came into this industry by finding enough work to be able to fully support myself without needing a real job. I had many peers who had to struggle for years in order to get themselves established enough that they were finally able to support themselves fully from only recording. I’ve always recognized that I was fortunate in being able to avoid having to pay those dues in the beginning of my career, but I’m certainly paying them on the back end.
One observation about this wacky wonderful world of recording. This business is one that encourages its base to paint the most glowing image possible, and it seems perfectly acceptable for us to stretch the truth in order to portray ourselves and our careers in a far more favorable light than the reality of our situation might actually reflect. It’s the Entertainment World, after all. A world of Spin, where perception is more important than reality, and where any means is acceptable as long as it reaches the goal of appearing successful. The best way to become successful is to first look successful. Personally, I’ve never been much on the PR front. I guess I recognize that I am a really lousy liar. Even if I were good at it, I don’t think I’d want to lead people to believe something that I know is not true about myself. I’m more of a realist.
I know that I’m not the only person in this business who has had this experience. But not many of us are willing to admit it. There is a lot of talk about how we’re now finding that we have to “branch out into new areas,” and lots of people are saying they’ve had to “reinvent themselves,” but not many of us admit “I’ve had to get out.” I know how difficult it is to do this, because I struggled with it for a long time, hoping that things would turn around. I hope this blog will serve as a source of encouragement for us to face reality, and accept and eventually embrace our situation, because that’s the point at which we can start to heal and things can get better in our personal lives.
And so, in the posts that are to follow, we’ll look at some of the changes I mentioned above. What exactly happened to change this business that I’ve loved? What has made it difficult for me to continue to earn a living in this business, and what changes have forced me to move on to something else?
Open up the archive to the right, and dig in.