PickledCherub

I'm all done with the workshop I attended this weekend at Jackpot! Studios. It involved twenty hours of listening to Larry Crane talk about things. I learned a whole lot of stuff about things such as compression and microphones and pre-amps and stuff, and realized that I don't know how to spell algorithm (Is there a Y? An E?). I do now. Jackpot has tampons in the bathroom, which is awesome, and practical, because ladies need tampons, sometimes.

Here's some observations/misconceptions I had this weekend.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into the control room (where all the mixing happens) was a box of Q-Tips. I thought, wow, Larry must really like to have clean ears when he's tracking. Really, Q-Tips are useful for cleaning out guitar input jacks and things of that nature.

Men, of a certain type and age, in the company of other men of a certain age and type, love to make jokes about their wives/ex-wives. This was the way Larry and Chris communicated, mainly.

I was the only lady in the class. I felt very shy for most of the time, due to the combo pack of not knowing a whole lot about technical stuff/not wanting to look silly.

Professional recording schools are a waste of time. Unless you go to Evergreen, apparently. I didn't know Evergreen had a musical engineering department. Now I do. Sometimes I think that maybe I would have liked Evergreen. I prefer Wintergreen.

I had all these cool ideas about which mics to use with different singers I know. I thought, on one of them, that Will would sound really good.

But, towards the end of the class, the last two hours, I got really bored. They were talking about things that don't apply to my life, such as tape and reel to reel (which I learned how to use in High School). The first day and a half were the most useful for me.

The thing I really learned, aside from basic technical stuff, is that the most important thing to do is listen to what you're trying to record.

I'm really glad I took this class, and now I'm all ready to record stuff.

Um, and I had some beer.