So I have a random question. How did you end up in this field? My daughter has exceptional hearing, loves physics and is extremely smart. I was telling her that being a sound engineer was a career path, but I had literally no idea how one ends up on that path. Her feelings might change, but I'd love to know more about how you ended up at Atmos.
And for the record, I hope Atmos takes over the world. I can hear the difference. I get that not everyone else can, but the difference to me is remarkable. My IT guy insists it's all hype, but how come when I test myself which version of a song is playing, I can always tell the Atmos?
My "origin story" is pretty similar to most of my colleagues. I was an up & coming artist, spent a lot of time in studios with engineers, pickled up a lot... but then that where my story diverges. My engineer became my producer and we were always having trouble finding time to work on my/our music so he took me on as an apprentice to help him get though his work faster. I got through it, started working as an engineer, and then he died tragically young. He was a bit of a local legend and I was the only person he ever trained, so I felt it was on me to carry on his legacy.
So, I spent several years in college studying recording arts and just about everything there was to learn about sound. Studied under Anthony Lai, director (perhaps former-director now) of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO), spent the next decade working cheap and gaining experience along the way. Finally reached a point, a couple years later, where there wasn't anyone out there who was still capable of quality I couldn't easily match....
Then, I was helping an old college buddy who's a film director edit his audio and film-audio introduced me to Dolby Atmos.
As soon as I heard it I knew I had to do music in Atmos, but unfortunately, Dolby Atmos music wouldn't become a thing for another year or 2. Nonetheless, I kept at it in my downtime, practicing and developing new techniques and then one day it become a real thing. I owned the studio I work at, so I got an investor to come in as co-owner and spent the money on building a world-class Dolby Atmos mastering room.
By the time Dolby Atmos Certification became a real thing, I was already more experienced than the people developing the course. So, certification was simple.
Despite all of this, there has been 1 thing I lacked that's REALLY made it a hard journey that i would recommend her not skipping:
Step1: Go to COLLEGE for Recording Arts. DO NOT WATCH YOUTUBE. Thats all just marketing. The misinformation is far too abundant there to ever get anywhere with YouTube. They make money by pushing narratives designed to make you a better type of consumer for the companies that pay them. If you ever got good from watching it, youd stop watching and would stop buying software hoping that something will be the secret to you not sucking. Its not in their best interest for her to ever get good, even in the rare times the YouTuber actually does know something about audio engineering. So, go to college and get a solid foundation. Go beyond Recording Arts and learn the science involved. That will open up additional job opportunities to fall back on.
Step2: Practice, Practice, Practice. Get the proper education FIRST, though. Picking up poor habits before you have a rock-solid foundation to build upon tends to be REALLY hard to unlearn the bad stuff. Work with friends and music of her own to sharpen skills. DO NOT try to charge people for services before nor directly after college. Everyone sucks for many years and people remember the bad mix you did a decade prior more than the great mix the day before.
Step3: Start looking for an apprenticeship at local studios after she gets certified. This has 2 VERY important advantages. Because I did things in reverse, I only got 1 of the 2 and it made my career very very hard to get anywhere. The first is that you learn directly next to a skilled teacher everyday. The second is that the successful artists that walk into that studio are the only chance you'll ever have to put big names on your resume early on. Often, the only time ever.
Its a stepping stone thing.
The first studio I worked at closed a couple years after my mentor died and I never got to get those lower credits on bigger name artists' projects. So, it took me a long time to get where I'm at career-wise and I'm still moving up step by step. Even so, it was the connections I made as an artist that ended up opening the doors for me in the end.
So, what I'm saying is that NETWORKING is insanely important. I didn't do enough networking until I got old enough that the artists I'd been working with for years started getting older and walking away from music. That forced me to have to start reaching out to people, making new acquaintances, offering favors, etc.
I assume she's young, so I would make sure she knows that internet/social media networking is barely networking at all. You need to build connections where people are willing to stick their neck out for you and inconvenience themselves at times to help you. That comes from knowing people in real life.
Step4: Once you're at the skill level you need and the door has been opened and the career is finally moving, its on you to do whatever it takes to always stay ahead of the curve.
Dolby Atmos WILL replace traditional stereo for the first time since stereo replaced mono, despite skepticisms related to the failure of surround sound music in the past.
Now that cars have, its a done deal. Nobody has to buy 2 copies like they did with surround sound. Nobody buys music at all, in fact. Its 1 master for all formats and all systems.
So, she'll need to be skilled in Atmos.
Although tech for consumers is getting cheaper, there is no soundbar solution for studios and headphones are an absolutely TERRIBLE way to try to work. All of the details that you and others find exciting about Atmos require a LOT of bouncing between headphones, 7.1.4, 5.1 and stereo to pull off. Otherwise, they sound awful in at least 1 of them because its all a dance between making things sound as spectacular as possible in 3D audio without ruining the stability of the stereo and binaural (headphones/earbuds emulation of 3D audio).
At the moment, I'm a unicorn. The standard being taught is to use the 3D space very very sparingly because its so difficult to pull of an exciting Atmos master without ruining playback in the other formats, yet I send objects flying throughout the entire song all the time. However, its only a matter of time before others catchup and the techniques we use become standard practice.
What I mean by there being no soundbar solution is that soundbar systems offer a lower quality Dolby Atmos experience for consumers on small budgets at home. You can't master music on a soundbar. Even if she were to cheap-out and build a home studio Atmos rig with budget monitors, that still 11 active-monitors and a subwoofer + a 16ch. DAC and monitor controller + 7 stands + 7 speaker isolaters + 4 ceiling mounts for the overheads above + hundreds of dollars worth of Mogami Studio Gold XLR cables + Great headphones + GalaxyBuds and an Android device + AirPods and an iOS device (you need both because Apple Spatial Audio is their own decoder that does NOT offer the same playback as real Atmos, so you need to check your work on both) a power conditioner that will feed stable sine wave power to every speaker, etc.... All that adds up.
That makes it a choice between having a professional quality stereo mastering rig or a shitty Atmos rig in which you can't hear enough detail nor accuracy to deliver the type of quality people want to hear in the car. Atmos has a tendency of revealing all of the flaws the engineers involved missed. That's why PMC is the choice of just about every reputable Dolby Atmos music studio out there. In which case, you're looking at around $45k-120k
Genelec "eggs" offer a decent quality alternative for a bit less, but you're still looking at at least a 5 digit number and those are generally broadcast Atmos studio monitors
Anyway, point being that immersive audio rescued our industry from being completely wiped out by artists putting out there own music because it made having a quality home studio so expensive that paying us is the much cheaper option. Not a single one of my clients will ever spend enough on music to pay for our Atmos room.
That's job security lol.
Anyway, hope that helps
