001 – Meet Scott Adamson
I love mixing live music.
Written by Scott Adamson
Well, it's summer of 2017 and I've been slowly working on The Production Academy for a little while. It's good to finally put out some videos and the response has been great! I'm happy that people are finding this stuff clear and helpful. It's certainly encouraging and makes me want to keep putting out more material.
I guess it might be nice to share a little about myself since I'll be sharing what I've learned with you. I grew up in California with my parents and two sisters, and my mother encouraged all of us to take up the piano. I can't thank her enough- it was a great way to learn music and get a sense of how music theory and harmony worked.
But I really liked playing drums. I don't know why. There is definitely something pretty satisfying about it. I'm sure it was pretty annoying to my family, but they kept the complaining to a minimum and I kept practicing and eventually found some friends in school to start playing with.
When I ended up wanting to record our songs, I got really into microphones and tape machines and pretty much anything else you'd find in a recording studio. I kind of got obsessed. There's a ton of musicians and producers I know that have gone through the same sort of obsession. It's fun stuff to get involved with!
So I opened a recording studio with a couple friends (it's closed now- they also now tour doing live sound). I made a lot of records and enjoyed the process of taking songs and working with musicians to shape them into finished tracks. Plus, the cool vintage microphones we had were pretty fun to play with.
But as you probably know, recording studios don't work like they used to. It's easy to plug into a laptop and make a record. There will always be need for studios and talented producers to make high quality recordings, but the small studio we were running was definitely affected by the rise of home recording.
During this whole time, I had been touring off and on as a drummer and as a FOH audio engineer. This was something I really enjoyed since I've always had a bit of a travel bug. So, when a friend's band asked me to go on tour with them full time I jumped on and have been touring doing sound as my main job ever since.
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One of the reasons this worked out so well for me is that the touring industry is booming. Some of the same technology that made home recording so easy also made it easy to share and stream music. Artists can't rely on record sales like before, so they're turning more and more to live music to pay the bills.
Another reason this job has worked for me is that I love to travel. This year, I've already been to Japan, Australia, the UK and Europe, as well as coast to coast quite a bit. I love living in NYC, but it's nice to be able to get out and see the world, and do some great shows on top of it!
I've been really lucky and have been able to tour with some amazing artists. And, I've met a ton of really cool and interesting people and made a lot of friends while doing these tours. Plus, there's so much live music and touring happening right now and more opportunity than ever for anyone who wants to get involved.
And that's one of the reasons I wanted to get all this information in one place. If you do want to know about how live music production works, it's way easier to look in one place for it than digging through a bunch of random YouTube videos. I'll be putting everything together in a (hopefully!) clear and informative series of courses. The first videos are ready now and I'll be posting them right here, on this blog, shortly, for free. And there's much more coming over the next few months, so stay tuned and thanks for visiting!
