where did i learn about sound recording?

i have taken a handful of courses both in high school and at carleton, but i don't think it helped much, and both were after i'd been recording for years. the actual truth is that my dad was a useful resource, here.

i actually wish he'd have written some kind of biography, so i could order his own life a little better; i wasn't born yet when he was in his early 20s, and he seemed to view that period of his life as something to take a bit of a step away from. but, what i was able to piece together is that he spent some time in the late 70s as a drummer and sound engineer, mostly dealing with local metal bands in and around ottawa.

now, he was a prog guy - his drum heroes were like terry bozio, bill bruford, phil collins, neil peart, that kind of thing. he was a big mike portnoy fan later in life. and, he had this kind of zappaesque disdain for punk rock as overly simplistic, although i think i was able to help him understand a little later on that the point of punk was political rather than musical. it was actually on his suggestion that i check out the dead kennedys, after i brought home a new offspring record, at the age of 13 - although he then made fun of me for listening to it.

i think this fundamentally warped his concept of punk rock for life:

...and he would constantly reference it in making fun of me for recording by myself, something that shows up here and there, tongue-in-cheek, if you look for it.

but, he wasn't exactly an expert or a working musician, either - he often insisted on owning a drum kit, but i never saw him actually play it, so i can't offer any kind of informed opinion about what he could actually do on it. i saw him noodle around on a bass a few times, and it was clear to me (as a seasoned guitarist, even at age 15) that he had no idea what he was doing. but, he fancied himself a drummer in his mind, anyways - and those were the musicians he followed, drummers in prog bands. 

but, it was enough to get me started, and that's really the most important thing, right? my concepts about microphones, about room acoustics, about equalization, about recording gear and even about guitar effects are rooted primarily in questions i asked in my mid to early teens, and while i know today that he was actually even flat out wrong about a number of things, that starting point was really invaluable.

......but, only up to a point.

i'm not a digital native, but i'm the very last gen xer and i had a computer with (dial-up) internet access in my bedroom before i turned 17. so, i'm not a digital native, i had a learning curve, but i'm just about at the end of the cusp of it - there are no doubt even people my age that would consider themselves digital natives. so, i was able to take these basic things i learned from my dad, and this glossary of language i understood, and just yahoo search it. this was before google, actually.

i toyed with going to school to be a sound engineer, and in hindsight i sort of wish i did, but my dad's apprehension about that period in his own life meant he wasn't going to pay for it, and the student loan system in ontario wouldn't cover it. these were expensive programs, too - $10,000/yr on base tuition, compared to around $1,500/yr at the local university (this was still the late 90s). so, i ended up stumbling through a math degree, instead, just due to the realities around me...

i don't think i'd have ended up working in a studio, though. i fundamentally can't deal with other people, and it sort of doesn't matter what my education is or might have been - i would have run up against this same brick wall of social awkwardness, regardless. it took me a long time to kind of figure that out. i would have enjoyed it a lot more, though, and i would have no doubt walked down a very different path and had a very different journey, even if i ended up in the same place, in the end. and, we're all dead, in the long run.

but, as a path, that's not something that was available to me, due to finances and the sort of societal perspective that it's not a vocation of much actual value. i was born poor and raised poor and found myself middle class due to marriages in my middle to late teens; regardless of where i started, the government will send poor kids to school to be doctors or lawyers or professors, but they won't send them to school to be sound engineers. you need substantive capital to invest up front if you really want to do that, and it just wasn't available to me.

so, i often sound like i have a fancy sound design degree, but i actually don't - what i actually have is a math degree, although i studied physics for a while, i took a handful of sound design courses and i went deep into the computer science and law programs, too. it's more that i grew up around gear, and learned about it by actually using it, and by asking functional questions, as a child does, to my dad, who owned the bulk of it.