How Important Is Recording School to My Career in Audio?

01/06/2012

If you’re like many aspiring music producers and audio engineers, you have probably wondered how important recording school is to achieving your career goals. Conventional wisdom says that if you want to excel at any profession, you need to go to school for it. While this is certainly true for careers like medicine or law, is it true in every case?

If you had the chance to talk to some music industry professionals, you might be surprised to learn that many of them don’t put a lot of stock in traditional recording schools at all. In fact, many of them never got a formal education, and many would even tell you that recording school is a waste of time and money. The simple reason for this is that the recording industry is a very practical profession, and is best learned simply by doing it.

Perhaps we are actually asking the wrong question. Maybe the question is not so much whether recording school is important to your career, but whether a recording education is important. And the fact is, education is important. You need to learn the technical skills of audio engineering and music production in order to become good at it. It’s just that in the music industry, that education doesn’t always happen in college classrooms or simulated recording studios.

There are many in the music business who believe it’s actually better to learn audio in a real recording studio, not in a college classroom. The reason is that it actually takes more than just an education to be a success in this field. The music recording industry is a bit of a “closed” system, in that it runs on inside connections. In order to get a job in this business, you really need to know someone. Traditional education takes place in isolated environments, where it is nearly impossible to make those kinds of connections. Thus, it is entirely possible for you to spend multiple thousands of dollars to go to recording school, and still find it difficult to get a job when you graduate.

By contrast, those who learn audio in real recording studios are actually learning on the inside, so by the time they have learned the skills, they have also formed the relationships they will need in order to find work. It is this reality that has caused the mentor-apprentice approach to gain in popularity in recent years. Schools using this approach teach their students in real-world recording studios, providing one-on-one instruction with real producers and engineers, thereby helping students get on the inside track of the music business while they learn.

So while recording school might not be absolutely vital to your career, a good recording education is certainly vital; and how you get that education could make all the difference.