Music: Studio and DAW Operations

Course description

This five-day course offers hands-on training in sound engineering and production inside Kingston School of Art's flagship Visconti Studio. Offering a hands-on learning experience you will be guided through the key skills required to understand and work in a professional studio environment. You will learn a variety of techniques, covering analog mixing consoles, signal flow, outboard processing, recording and mic techniques, mixing and a full AVID Pro Tools overview. On completion of this course, you will be able to competently record, mix and master your own music, and have a solid understanding of a professional studio environment.

This is a fun and intensive course which will suit any candidate wishing to further their music production skills or who might be looking to venture into the world of music production on a professional basis. Any student with instrument experience will have the opportunities to play and record if they wish.

Due to the professional studio nature of this course there is a minimum age of 18 for delegates.

Example course structure

• Day 1 
  Learning the studio - Complete analog desk overview, signal flow, patchbay, outboard gear, microphones and mic techniques.
• Day 2 
  Recording Audio and Pro Tools - Pro Tools lesson in MIT suite, setting up mics and recording an audio signal in the studio
• Day 3 
  Advanced recording techniques - Recording a drum kit with multiple mics, understanding mic phase and some advanced processing using outboard equipment. Overview of parallel processing.
• Day 4 
  Recording a live performance.
• Day 5 
  Mixing and mastering - a hybrid mixing overview demonstrating the full use of outboard equipment and in the box DAW processing. This will utilise all the skills learnt over the week. At the end of the week, you will have the stems from all recorded material to take home and continue practising with.

What to bring

A basic list will be sent to you a week in advance of the course start date. All other materials are provided by Kingston School of Art (KSA)

Course tutor

Charlie has worked as a professional musician and studio engineer for nearly 20 years. In this time he has worked with and performed alongside artists including Sir Tom Jones, Candy Staton, Beverly Knight and Corinne Bailey Rae. As a studio engineer, Charlie has recently worked as the assistant musical director for FOX TV, producing all the audio for live game show television productions. He regularly works in some of the UK's most established recording studios,  including Real World studio, Abbey Road, RAK studio, Angelic studio and Metropolis studios. Charlie has built and designed several recording studios. Charlie is a passionate teacher who loves to deliver lessons with a creative and fun outlook, whilst keeping the content valuable to real-world experiences. Charlie seamlessly blends modern digital music production with traditional analog workflows to help students really understand the concepts and approaches to recording, mixing and audio editing. Charlie is the author of the book Music and How It Works and has taught music and studio engineering for over 10 years.

We will be running this course in summer 2023, course dates coming soon! Please contact us for further information.