Working Conditions Part 1

Before I begin, I want to let you know that this is a rant. There is little if any substantial content in today’s blog, so if you don’t read it I won’t be offended.

If you haven’t seen my profile, I’m a sound engineer. I love sound with everything in me, and it is without a doubt my passion. It’s what I think about when I wake up in the morning and what I think about when I go to sleep. Last year I was studying Information Systems Engineering at CTI, and at the end of the year I decided that no matter what happened I needed to work in sound, and so I dropped out of college and started working in a studio.

The studio I started working in is owned by a guy I know, and it is a rather small, budget type studio. For me it is a start, and while I enjoy working there, I know I won’t be working there for long because want to go onto bigger things.

The truth is that my boss and I don’t see eye to eye when it comes to a lot of different things. He tends to value ‘value-for-money’ over performance. So for example, if there is a mic that costs 1500 which performs at level 4, and a mic that costs 8000 that performs at level 10, he’ll chose the cheaper one because it does an ok job for less money. I on the other hand would rather have the more expensive one because it is much better, even though it does cost a lot more.

Now most of the time this is ok, but it gets really old very quickly, and it is very irritating, because I can’t get things to sound the way I want them to, which is no fun. The other thing is that at no stage do we have anything that is actually ‘great’. Everything is just ok, and being ok sucks a lot. We spend so much time trying to get things to work, and sound better than they do, it pisses the shit out of me. For the first few weeks it was ok, but after that it just becomes so tiring you don’t want to do it anymore.

The situation is aggravated by two additional factors:

I am a purist, as well as a dreamer and idealist. So while I know that a Neumann U87 costs R20 000, it doesn’t stop me from wanting 8, as well as about 100 other great mics which would costs about the same or more each, without even talking about compressors and preamps [I will talk about these things another time]

The second thing is that my boss is actually quite stubborn, and wouldn’t admit we need the above things unless his life depended on it. He even goes as far as to say that some of the crap, and most importantly cheap, gear we have is better than the expensive stuff. Which is a load of shit, but what can you do?

Now don’t get me wrong, my boss is an amazing guy, extremely caring and generous, and very talented as a sound engineer, but he just won’t get new stuff. Which is a major problem for me because I’m a self professed ‘gear addict’.

So right now I’m pretty frustrated, not being able to do what I want to, it’s just not much fun…

But there is one other thing that’s making the working situation even worse, enter part 2 of the story…