Sound engineer

By MARK STORY

Name: Clint Murphy

Job title: Sound engineer

Working hours: Typical week 10am till midnight six days a week depending on what's on.

Employer: York St Recording Studios, Auckland

Age: 24

Pay: Up to $300 a week for an assistant, through to $250 a day for an established sound engineer. Top-earning sound engineers usually work freelance.

Qualifications needed: Diploma in audio engineering. To be accepted on the SAE Institute's one-year full-time course you must have School Certificate or NCEA Level 1 in maths and science.

Career prospects: You can work on TV, documentaries or films. Your reputation will determine how much you get paid and the projects you're asked to work on. Once you have enough experience in the local industry you may be able to take your skills overseas.


Q.What do you do?


A. At York St we specialise in acoustic recordings. That could be anything from a jingle for a TV ad through to a 40-piece orchestra. My job is to work alongside the musicians and producer to get good sounds and capture the sense of an actual performance from live recording sessions.

A recording session, which takes three days or so, typically starts with setting up the instruments, the headphone mixes for each musician to listen to, and all the gear used to record the live performance.

Once recorded, the live performance may require overdubbing. That's when parts of the performance are re-recorded to get the right sounds. I then take all the tracks that have been recorded and mix them to achieve the desired stereo format.


Q.Why did you choose this line of work?


A. I wanted to follow my dad, who's a drummer, into the music industry. Helping out in the recording studio at high school got me hooked on the industry.

I came up from Tauranga after doing the 6th form to do the SAE Institute diploma in audio engineering in Auckland. What skills do you need to become a sound engineer? In addition to having a passion to be the best, you'll need to dig the science of sound, and how different sounds work - so it's handy to know some physics and maths.

You'll also need strong people skills when relating to musicians and producers.

Q. Best part of the job?

A. I like to work on the big gear that's found within a major, full-on recording studio. I was stoked to win a Tui Award for my work on the Blindspott album. I've worked with many of New Zealand's top bands, including Zed, The Feelers, and Bic Runga.

Q. Most challenging/difficult part of the job? Handling disagreements among band members requires a lot of tact. Especially when they look to me for advice on how their music should sound.

A. It's important to be up-front about the sounds I'm hearing at the beginning of the session.

Q. What sort of training do you get?

A. During your diploma you'll learn how sound works and how it gets turned into music. You'll also learn how recording gear works.

When you hit the workforce as an assistant, you'll learn the practical stuff and develop an ear for what's required on each unique job.

You must prove your competency when given your shot to wear the sound engineer's shoes.

Q. Any interesting one-off projects?

A. No two recordings are the same, but I once recorded a live haka for an Oceanic album. By overdubbing three times, we created some awesome sounds.