Grad Panel Flyer
The event started at 1:35 pm with the three grads sitting at a table on the stage of the live sound room. The grads talked about all of their experiences between the past three to twelve years being at Electric Lady, to helping work with Kanye West on his Life of Pablo album, to even working with Chris Lorde Alge.
Their placement stories are incredible, mainly about being at the right place at the right time along with extreme work ethic and positive attitudes. The talk of daily life of the engineers is so vastly different from what is taught at school because of how much technology is changing.
Next subject included perfect interns, which included the characteristic of being very detail oriented; especially with Mr. Schultz. Mr. Karpen focused on the idea of being on top of everything while here at CRAS because this is close to the real world. Kris, who is an engineer at a big theatre, and his focus was to do nothing but practice your skills and to not make the engineer's job harder in any way. The common theme was to be aware of what battles you pick as far as asking questions.
We then discussed the student life while they were at CRAS. All were basically studio rats after hours. They were then asked why they came to CRAS; Kris had already had studio experience before he came here, Nik saw an ad in Rolling Stone, and Ike also saw an ad in a magazine. Ike then described his time being in AES and never sleeping for days on end while he was doing things at school. In other words, sleep is for the weak. He then talked about how incredibly fast you need to be at Pro Tools after seeing Phil Nichols work his wizardry on the program. Kris's motto was "Fifteen minutes early is on time, On time is late, and late is FIRED".
File management was a huge subject that was covered over and over, especially with Pro Tools and operating it. "You need to know what you were thinking three months ago"-Nik Karpen. Another thing that was said multiple time was that signal flow is your alphabet. Kris told us about being in a union, and he said that being in a union would only guarantee a bigger paycheck and healthcare. We then talked about tax purposes with freelancing, and a big tip of advice was to research everything about your taxes, what income is taxable, be able to write an invoice, and have your taxes be paid quarterly.
Disaster stories was the next topic, and Kris was talking about how Paul Sparks was running late and the console was not set up for an announcement, and the console sent 32 channels of audio to the main left speaker. Three times. "That was terrible."- Kris. Ike's story was of a European pop singer, and the engineer who he was communicating with had a communication breakdown with the producer. "Did you want the music right or did you want the vocals right? Because it's not both."- Ike. Nik claimed to not have any stories because he "suppresses bad memories".
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