AES Student Blog

 

For me, it was always there in some form. However, my passion for music really came through when my older brother gifted me his old acoustic guitar - I think I was 13 at the time. I played for 10 hours straight every day when I got it. Later, when I was around 16, he started studying audio engineering at the SAE institute for fun. Because of this, I discovered another passion for the engineering side of things. He used to take me to the studios, showed me around and played me his mixes. I quickly realized, that's what I wanted to do as well. So I bought some beginner audio equipment and started producing stuff in my bedroom. My love for audio only ever grew from there.

 

 

I mixed the song "melancholie" from the german Indie-Pop band "gleich da". It's an upbeat song about the ups and downs in life, looking back and reflecting on the hard times and then moving on from that. It uses water and tides as a metpahor for this concept, and so the entire song revolves around a wave-like structure, going up and down in intensity, with piano and organ sections flowing in and out - just like the rising tides. The production is centered around this element and I tried to complement the song structure by mixing it in a wave-like fashion aswell. We spend a good half year start-to-finish on this production. This is including a high amount of pre-poduction - visiting the band on live concerts and during practice-sessions, talking about lyrics, arrangements, instruments and making sure the song itself was in the right state to be recorded in the first place. For me it's very important to spend time with the musicians I want to record, get to know them, know how they work and to make sure that we have great song. After all - no amount of production can turn a bad song into a good one.

 

 

We have a very strong student section in Hamburg, Germany - with regular study trips, workshops, lectures and events. I wanted to be part of it, so I joined it pretty much immediately when I started studying there. Now I can help to shape the section as vice chair and hopefully attract new members the same way I was attratced back then.

 

 

The best experience of any AES convention is talking to all the amazing people, professionals and students attending the event and getting to know them. Forging these connections is incredibly valuable. But I also really enjoyed all the student offerings this year, which seemed particularly abundant. And the Heyser lecture, as always, was a real highlight aswell.