Summer Intern Series 2023

Hello there! My name’s Amar, and this is the start of my intern blog. I’ll be writing about what work I get up to at Tapeworks and some of the other stories I have to share during my internship here. I haven’t written blog posts before, so we’ll see how this ends up going. I’ll try to make my writing compelling and maybe a little funny-

I recently graduated from UHart majoring in Music Production and Technology with a minor in computer science. I technically don’t have my degree yet though. My last requirement I have to complete is an internship at a recording studio. I reached out to a good handful of studios in the Hartford area and Bill responded back to me, offering to teach me and give me some work to do.

This week I got to help out with a good variety of things around the studio. I started off by helping Bill with recording two podcasts.

We did a fair bit of rearranging to set up the live room for podcasting since we were expecting a larger group. I got to see how Bill thought out the set up, making sure that the audio, video, lighting, and set were all good to go. Plants with a little glow underneath them is a pretty snazzy look.

Bill was able to switch camera angles while the group was recording to get an edit that was already close to being finished. After a little more mixing, he handed it off to me to clean up the video and audio. Cleaning up audio in a podcast reminded me a lot of editing tom fills. Oftentimes there’d only be one person talking, so I would go through and selectively mute the other people’s mics so there’d be less room sound and comb filtering.

Bill had another podcast to record that was hybrid with one person in the studio and another on Zoom. It’s cool to see how many different services Bill is able to offer. It requires a lot of understanding of different technologies and how they’re able to work together.

Later in the week, I spent some time mixing a student band’s cover of “Feelin’ Good”. It usually takes me a while longer than a day to get a mix done, so it was a good challenge for myself to see how close I could get to a finished mix in a limited amount of time. It was a little stressful to start off and I was making a few mistakes- but after a certain point I got into the groove of working on the song. Bill enjoyed what I was doing with mix and worked on it for a short while after to get it over the finish line.

I got to finish off the week seeing how Bill ran a session to record a client’s piano compositions. It was a pretty quick and minimal setup. The bulk of the session was working with the client to get the takes we needed. I shadowed Bill and helped keep track of takes and noted spots that would have to be fixed. I got to see how Bill makes his edits and how he’s able to quickly understand what section of the song he’s in, even if he doesn’t have sheet music. I was also reminded how it’s important to have good soft skills–like understanding the artist’s needs–to balance with the technical know-how so the client has a good experience during their recording session.

So that about does it for my recap of this week. There’s gonna be lots more that I learn and do over the course of this internship. Maybe my next steps will be getting a better handle at the signal flow and gear that Bill has in the studio. I’ve got an okay idea of how things are set up in there, but there’s definitely some complex stuff going on.

I’ll leave off with a little factoid about myself. I’ve got a cute pet bird named Ginger. He’s a rascal and meanie sometimes, but we still love him!