The pargraphes that follow are stories that I find myself telling students on a regular basis. I decided to document these so that I could include them as part of my profile so that students could learn about me and about what they are learning about at the same time. One advantage of the process was the clarifying of thought that putting an experience down on paper gave me. 

My first record was a gold record called "Australian my Homeland" it was a promotional record for Luxaflex and they ordered a 100,000 units. I was an assistant engineer and had to record an overdub and combine this with a couple of instruments onto a stereo track on a one inch eight track Scully tape machine. Because we only had eight tracks we had to premix overdubs to fix all the parts onto the eight tracks. The new part and the old tracks need to be balanced with reverb to fit in the final record and once combined were unable to be separated. When the record was mixed I was congratulated on my balance and how it fitted in the mix perfectly. It was perfect but I didn't see this as a difficult achievement because I could hear the end result in my mind as I recorded and combined the tracks.

At the Audio Workshop I was making TV and radio commercials and the music backing had to be exactly 29 seconds radio commercials and 30 seconds for radio commercials. We had our music on records and generally standard song length of three and a half minutes. I had to record the start of the music on an Otari MX5050 two track tape machine and then cue the record at the end of the song and drop the end in time on the recorded start on the tape machine. This involved letting the record go just before you hit record on the tape machine to let the record ramp up to speed. This procedure would be difficult for me to do now but I found that I could do this job quite efficiently and without too many attempts. The reason behind this procedure was to be able to reuse the tape so we didn't cut and splice the tape. The result was seamless and as a result faster that cutting and splicing. This job was an unforgettable part of my initiation into the world of Audio Engineering.

I was working doing voice over work at Silk Sound in Berwick Street, Soho, London and a band came over from Australia that wanted to record. I knew the Engineers at Abby Road so we recorded the bass, drums and guitar in Studio 3. I was recording the drums for the recording while having AC/DC Highway to Hell in my mind as a drum sound. The studio had B&W speakers. I put on AC/DC Highway to Hell as a reference for the drums once we had finished setting the sounds and compared the two and I found I couldn’t have changed a thing. Our drum technician at the time decided to tighten up the snare after listening to the same reference and reduced the effect somewhat but it was an audio experience I will never forget.

At the time that I recorded at Abbey Road Studios I was working at Silk Sound and Lecturing at SAE in London. Because I had these studios as a resource I bounced the rhythm beds from Abbey Road onto the Lexicon Opus mainframe workstation at Silk Sound and recorded the vocals and the solos. I then laid these tracks back onto the 24 track machine to be mixed. I chose to mix the project at SAE because we had just bought 10 Neve VR consoles and the sound was amazing. Warm and I thought better than the grey faced Neve consoles I was used to working with in Australia mainly because they had compressors and gates on every channel. I thought I would get a bit of a live feel and mix the band with a little volume. The mix took eight hours because there were too many songs and I ended up with sore ears afterwards. I went to Seattle soon after and I can remember that in the city I would have sore ears and when I went to the beach I would be absolutely fine. When I went into the city I would again be pained again. It took years for me to recover from tis experience. What happened next professionally is another story but the message here is to look after your hearing - it needs to be managed if you are going to have a long career in Audio Engineering. You will need to have appropriate rest and you need to be vigilant not to expose yourself to too high sound pressures that could effectively ruin your career. It only takes one mistake to dash your future dreams.

I was fortunate enough to be able to get an apprenticeship after I finished school. I worked for a year without getting paid and didn’t think that was unusual. I only missed one day and that was a decision I regretted afterwards to this day. After three years I could function as an Audio Engineer and had my own clients. I soon started teaching at SAE in Brisbane and this started a long career in audio education. I was also doing live sound at the time mixing studio musicians at pubs and when my principle band wanted to record I took them to record at Suite 16 and mix them at Starsound—two of the principle studios in Brisbane. Starsound was a very expensive studio and one thing that struck me about the studio was when I walked into the live room it was the quietest place I had ever been in life. What is import about a quiet room is that you catch all the nuances of the voice down to the sputum bubbles in the mouth and it makes a big difference when placed in the song. Having a compressor bringing this information up instead of background noise is very important. Getting back to live sound, I have always found live sound a really good way to get clients into the recording studio and would advise all students to learn live sound because there is work in the industry for new engineers. I followed this band down to Sydney and was able to make records at Trafalgar and Trackdown. The members from this band also invited me to record them at Abby Road so the partnership has been a good one.

I left being a lecturer at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music to work full time as the State Trainer for Staging Connection where I was able to train 300 crew members over Queensland in vision, lights and sound. I gained valuable insight in these other two areas of live sound and would advise students to know Vision and Lighting Systems as part of their professional repertoire. Most live event employers will give the advantage to someone with a broader skillset than just someone with audio skills and it doesn’t take much to be able to talk about these others areas of expertise. Some companies start their engineers off as lighting technicians so this proves my case. Would you hire someone that knows what a Wieland cable is or someone who does not?

With experience in teaching I was able to work at Alchemea full time and lecture at SAE both in London. When I came back to Australia after nine years in the UK I was Production Manager for Radio 4BC and then found myself studying Music Technology at the Queensland Conservatorium. After completing my studies I continued as a lecturer at the Conservatorium and experienced some powerful teaching experience. One of these was when the Audio Technology Department partnered with the Jazz department to give the students studio experience. The Conservatorium hired top Music Producers (Gary McDonald in this instance) to accompany the producer for the recording. The Jazz students learnt studio etiquette and recording practice. I have taken this powerful example programme integration into my teaching practice.

I had an enlightening experience at Festival Studios in Sydney. I did preproduction on Chris Morrow’s Just What I Needed which was tracked at Festival and Mixed at Trafalgar by Charlie Fisher. I went to the drum session and found this very large room. It was fully carpeted and wasn’t overly inspiring and I thought to myself how are they going to record drums in here. I had learnt long before not to open my mouth in a professional session but I was used to recording in pretty good environments at that stage. The engineer was a classical engineer from England that had done some work with the Cure. The first thing the engineer did was put the drums on a drum riser and this made a big difference to the drum sound. The next thing amazed me and because of this experience I never look at an acoustic environment as a done deal. The engineer got the engineers at Festival to make gobos with corrugated iron sheets on them, 10ft high, and about a dozen in number. When it was set up I looked from the drummer’s position and everywhere I looked was corrugated iron. They were staggered but covered the large corner section of the room. The drums sounded fantastic and I learnt a valuable lesson in record production—you can change your environment or create your own acoustic environment. To add to the importance of this realisation the main factors to a sound on a microphone is the sound source and the acoustic environment. If you get this right any microphone will pick up something good. I recorded the demo of Just What I Needed in an old house but it had a section that was tiled with one stonewall. We put an SM57 in that environment and got the most splendid results on the vocals and I knew it was the diffused high frequencies that made it sound so great.