Audio Engineering College - STEP by STEP Diary to let u know what it's all about!

[guitargod09]

Hey you guys, I felt doing something a little different here. I just started going to college for my audio engineering degree at Minneapolis Media Institute (Flyte Time Studios complex) in Edina, MN. Just to answer some questions that people have been wondering about, I'm going to try to keep a log of my everyday activities that I have in school. I feel that since I'm starting, I should let people know what's going on in these schools to see if they're right for you, or not really in your boat. It was an excellent week. By far the best week I've ever had in school. It's late but I'll log my first week in the morning (or afternoon).

Minneapolis Media Institute | Recording School | Music Production College | Video Game School | Game Design School | Animation College

Instructors:
Tom Tucker (Platinum and Gold Jonny Lang, George Benson, Prince, Soul Asylum, Chaka Khan, etc)
Paul Peterson (The Steve Miller Band, David Sandborn, Boz Scaggs, Kenny Loggins, Paula Abdul, etc.) You get it... I'm getting too lazy.
Jason Miller
Dugan McNeill
Adam Frischhertz
Pamela McNiell
Adam Krinsky
Richard McCalley

and others.

[bholst]

Looking forward to reading what you have to say about it! Thanks for doing that!

[guitargod09]

Day 1: Audio Engineering 112
We are awaiting to enter into our first classroom of the program. I have to say being in a pro recording studio was going to be real exciting seeing all of the equipment, the outboard gear and the massive console. Waiting outside with only a handful of people was appealing to me, since I knew that I was going to get good attention. Walking in was a bit of a surprise. There sat a 16 channel Mackie mixer with a pair of NS-10's and a small Digidesign interface, the Pro MBox 2, dvd player, an iMac, a little whiteboard and a projector screen. This wasn't what I was expecting, but was it a bad thing? I'll get back to this later.
We started off with a little lecture. It was a pretty entertaining one, considering I really liked my teacher, Dugan McNeil. It was more of a class discussion between all of us. We started off with a little History lesson about the first recording studios (1890's!). We basically went over how the studios changed with the new technologies and trends up to today. It was quite interesting, actually. After this Histoy lesson, we jumped into a different mixing room.
There was one rack of outboard gear and another Mackie mixer with a pair of KRK v6's. We got a crash course in signal routing and started hands on hooking up a mic, the monitors, using the preamp and faders, learning the layout of the board, and sending to different buses to the 2-Bus (Master). So, we were starting from the basics, but it definitely wasn't a bad thing reviewing stuff.
We went back to the original room. Here's a quick overview of stuff that we went into:
Basic physics of sound - vibration of molecules, compression, rarefaction, propagation, sound pressure level, etc.
Waveform characteristics - wave length, frequency, amplitude, velocity, phase
thresholds - hearing, feeling, and pain.

[paul999]

I'll be following this one as well.

[guitargod09]

Day 2: Introduction to DAW's (Digital Audio Workstations)
I was excited for the day. We needed a pair of studio headphones and a good hard drive. I purchased a 500 GB Firewire hard drive and the Audio Technica ATH-50's for my can's (Thank you Brandon!).
In this session, we started discussing The basic layout of DAW's and how they emulate hardware consoles. They're all fundamentally the same, but we looked through several examples of different DAW's to look at the differences. We went into the things need in a basic recording system and went into more advanced and complex systems. After this, we went into depth with the parts of a computer system (different hardware and software, what does what and how it affects your recordings). Basically everything here was covered. Right away we went into the rec lab, consisting of iMac's and The Digidesign MBox Pro 2's at each station along with M-Audio Axiom 49 MIDI stations. We went over the systems we were using in this lab, and learned how to format our hard drives to the Mac systems and PC systems. We over-viewed the Snow Leopard operating system and learned the more efficient ways around the OS (using the Finder, quick keys, etc.). After this we went into our first project. Our instructor had us start on Cubase 5. We opened up a folder and it was all of the dry tracks used on Radiohead's "Nude". Our instructor showed us around Cubase, and said, "have at it!" So the rest of our class, we got to mess around with adding different fx and messing with EQ and tracks. It was a fun way to manuever around Cubase and get to listen to my new headphones! A fun hands on session.
As you can see, basic setup, and a good general overview of how all of this recording stuff works. I knew a lot of this stuff from this site, but a lot of ground is being covered in two days. I was realizing that I needed to experience this stuff. This was the basics, the laying of the foundation for learning this stuff.

[guitargod09]

Day 3: Media and Society
I'm not going to go too in depth with this class since it's more of a general ed class. I love this class though because it's drawn towards so much of what we're doing in the school. It very analytical and almost philisophical, talking about how out media tends to shape and completely change our view points, opinions and "facts", and society as a whole.Disscussion of forms of communication (oral, written, printed, electronic, digital, etc) Basically a class with lots of music videos, movies, and videogames. We even watched the beginning of Farris Bueller's Day Off (!) to talk about post-modernism.

[guitargod09]

Day 4: Electronic Musicianship
Back in the 1st Recording lab with the Axiom. No DAW today. For discussion, we went over the History of MIDI, the first synthesizers, and the impact this had on the industry. The USI Universal Synthesizer Interface adapted to bring out MIDI signal. We went in depth with the technical end of MIDI to understand why and how it does what it does. Different types of MIDI controllers were thrown about: keyboards, mouses, drum pads and triggers, microphones, etc. When we finished the lecture end we opened up a new project in Reason.
We went into detail the lay out and capabilities of Reason, which i loved because I've always wanted to use it. We learned about more routing techniques by the animated routing matrix on the back of the outboard gear. We put in a drum machine and randomized it just to throw something together quick. We made our first simple project from scratch putting in random virtual instruments in the rack. Pretty much did this to get a handle on what this program was like and the power of a program like this. Obviously there were a lot of details involved, but nothing vital knowing here.

[guitargod09]

btw if you have any questions or feel im not being in depth enough or something let me know. I wrote the first week up so i kind of just did it by memory (not to mention its 3:30 AM). ill start daily now.

[Lateralus359]

I always wanted to know what they did in those colleges! Cheers man for sharing the info!

[nme]

Do you have a textbook?