Sweetwater Internship Post 4 - 3/19/2021

This week went by quick. There was a lot to do, and a lot to learn. Throughout this week, we had a client coming in every day to rehearse with his band for a stream which would ultimately be recorded on Wednesday. When it was time for the performance, I learned a bit about what it's like to record an entire live session in a studio using Dante technology, as well as what the relationship between studio engineer and artist producer/manager looks like. The performance was really awesome to be a part of overall. I got some experience in several areas, like running monitor mixes, setting up LED light screens, patching cables to make them look good for a live performance, using snakes and a split, and several other things that you only get to do in a live show setting.

Another big project that I had was to organize and re-arrange every single drum head that the studio had access to. There were hundreds of drum heads that I pulled out and sorted through. Then I had to organize them by brand and size and return them to the shelves they came from and label the spots they would then sit in. This was probably the biggest project I had this week, because it took several hours to complete.

Lots of setting up and tearing down happened this week. There were several different projects all happening very close to each other. For example, I had to help set up for a drum sampling session, which went very heavy on the use of microphones in order to capture the sound of the drums as best as possible. Also, a local band came into the studio to record a couple songs with some video for a local radio station. It was fun to work with them because they were young and were not as stern and serious as many studio musicians are. They weren't afraid to have some fun. Their guitarist came in with a guitar that had an amplifier built into the body of the guitar, so it was awesome to see how a Sweetwater engineer would mic something like that. They simply used one Schoeps SDC about a foot away from the amp.

To end the week, I did some more setup for a couple of sessions that will occur over the weekend. One of those sessions will involve the Hammond B3 organ that we keep in the studio. The engineer in charge of this session, Dave, explained to me that there was an odd sound coming from the turntable inside the leslie as it speeds up and slows down. I got to hear it a couple times, and since I have lots of background in repairing and cleaning clocks, I really became interested in trying to figure out how to fix this problem. Still, I couldn't figure it out while I was there, so now I'll be doing some research on how leslies work and what might be causing the unwanted noise.

Stay tuned for some more news on my internship as time goes by!