How good are your teachers?

At some point in our education we start to question our teachers. Not just ask about the subject at hand, but actually wonder how accurate and comprehensive their knowledge is. Are we getting a good deal?

This wasn't always the case. In general we don't question or teachers knowledge until we leave school. That's the time when we begin to wonder if our parents are always right, and if the TV news can be trusted.

As adults we have to question almost every source before trusting it. The web and YouTube is awash with advice, much of it good, but mostly poorly written and presented, of questionable quality and often downright wrong. So what constitutes a reliable source?

Take sound engineering. One of our team members is in his 50's. When he was a teenager there were no formal qualifications or lessons at his school and none that he knew of at college or university. And of course no internet. His first book on the subject was called "You and Your Tape Recorder" and it contained the advice that if you left your voice activated mic on the windowsill at night, in the morning you'd have a lovely recording of bird song!

There were also some more authoritative books such as John Borwick's Sound Recording Practice, but these books were targeted at professional studio engineers and not home recording enthusiast on a budget.

As affordable home recording equipment became available in the 1980s, tec publishers started commissioning books on music technology, sound recording and MIDI etc.

The thing about books, is that we know they have gone through some kind of process before being published. To ensure good reviews (often by other industry experts) they will usually have been scrutinised by editors and checked by other professionals for errors. In short they have been curated and although not fool proof this still counts for something. Publishing and marketing physical books is expensive, surely they checked!

At Project Studio Handbook we have all benefited from reading great books written by expert authors, known in their field with proven track records. In recent years esteemed producers and engineers have published fascinating biographies, but not always containing the kind of technical detail us home recordists crave.

Today, the emerging generation of engineers and musicians don't read books or manuals. Why should they? YouTube has videos on every conceivable topic and process. We are in the video tutorial age. We go to YouTube first. But can we believe everything we see and hear?

OK, so a video telling us how to get a killer kick drum sound in Cubase (God give us strength!) is straight forward enough, but what if we want to learn what some theory, such as what a compressor does. We haven't seen a single video that accurately and comprehensively covers the subject (yes of course we have a playlist in the works!).

So, here's our checklist for helping to determine if a video is likely to contain accurate theoretical information ..

1. The presenter is using a script (you can't ad lib technical subjects and theory, the language needs to be accurate)
2. The shots are well lit and composed
3. Voice over is accompanied by cutaways that illustrate the points being made
4. Animations are used (they are hard to produce so you know some serious effort has been made)
5. The presenter does not start the video by saying "What's happening?".

Perhaps you have your own criteria?

That's it for this week. We're off to search for videos on stereo recording. We have plenty of great books an articles on the subject, but hey, video is better, isn't it?!

Thanks for watching and reading
FairFax