Recording at Omega Studios School
In the late summer of 2005, my family moved up to Fairfax Station, Virginia. Just thirty minutes away from Washington D.C., there were stunning historical sites, amazing museums, and a totally different culture from Tijeras, New Mexico. This included a very diverse music scene and competitive audio engineering opportunities. After doing some internet research of the recording schools in the area, I knew I wanted to go to Omega Studios School of Applied Arts and Sciences in Rockville, Maryland.
My dad and I visited Omega Studios within a couple weeks of settling into our new home and we were given a comprehensive tour with a few other prospective students. It was like walking in a dream, the studio spaces were gorgeous. Studio A was the largest room, where they could place choral ensembles and recently outfitted the control room with a Neve VR-60 console. Studios B and C were much smaller studios, but they had warm SSL 4048E/G and API 2488 consoles, had top notch acoustics, and racks of analog gear. Studio D was a mastering control room with a Digidesign ProControl at the time. My fondest memory of that tour was an engineer showing us the SSL buss compressor in Studio B; as he was playing a mix on the console, he hit the button and everything in the mix came together in a way I had never heard before. After the tour, I was hooked and signed up for the Recording Engineering Studio Techniques course (and later for their “Audio Production Techniques” course which focused on getting Pro Tools Operator Certification).
The class was made up of about twenty people who had different types of goals: some wanted to be music producers, some wanted to run live sound for venues, and others wanted to start their own businesses. Our teacher for the first part of the program was Bob Yesbeck, who was the owner and founder of Omega Studios. He had worked with some amazing artists, I recall him talking about working with D.C. rockers, Bad Brains. I feel so lucky that I got to pick his brain because he retired from teaching the course that year.
Looking back before I started my coursework, I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about audio engineering; I had been running live sound at church and recording at home for a few years at that point. I had learned a lot on my own, but in the first couple of classes at Omega, I was floored with information pouring from the textbooks and from Yesbeck and his team. I would wake up before 5am each day and take the Metro train with my dad as he went to work, sit outside the studio for several hours before class, my eyes in the workbooks and trade magazines.
After several lectures on the common studio terms, classroom labs on microphones and speakers, and some short tests in the upstairs classroom, we were split up into several small groups and moved down to the recording studios, armed with the manuals of each of the analog consoles. I had three teachers that I worked with a lot in my group: Caleb Keiter, the Pro Tools guru in the Audio Production Techniques course, Shannon Follin, who is super knowledgeable of the analog world in the Recording Engineering and Studio Techniques course, and Scotty O’Toole, who was training to become an instructor at the time and now is a Senior Staff Engineer at Omega.
In the control rooms, we were drilled on signal flow, how to utilize the patchbay, recording on ProTools HD as well as cleaning and running the 24 track Studer tape machines. I loved the musicality in the sound of tape and the analog processors; that became a sound I aspire to. As a group, we were given several recording and mixing projects to gain more experience with miking techniques and to get acquainted with the different boards in each studio.
The course was about six months long and the time in the studio went by so quickly, but I loved every minute of it. All the bands we recorded were local bands who signed up for discounted studio time to be recorded by students (and the mixes were closely supervised by the instructors), which was a great program for bands in such a competitive environment. My final project was to record and mix a band by myself and I had selected a 4-piece alt-country band. Though having extra hands helping mic instruments up or setting up the board would have been nice to have, but it gave me a lot of confidence in my abilities as an engineer.
To this day, I use everything that I studied at Omega Studios School. I learned to record bands, mix what I recorded and analyze what I am hearing. Omega’s curriculum even included sessions on soldering, studio organization, as well as a set of classes on writing a resume and approaching the interview process.
Talking with friends who have gone to similar facilities, I am so glad I had selected Omega Studios. The class size in the studio was very small, not more than a few students and an instructor in the control rooms. There was a focus on learning the material to become an intern at a studio, but the information could also be used to start a studio or become a freelance engineer. Additionally, I got more hands-on time on the analog equipment than my peers from other schools and had plenty of opportunities to get answers to my questions from any of my teachers, who were more than happy to talk shop.
I did successfully complete the program, but that didn’t mean I graduated knowing everything. Mixing techniques such as equalization, compression, and adding time-based effects like reverb and delay are things I still learn about more each time I use them. Omega Studios School helped me understand the science of those processes and has continually inspired me to shape the musical sounds I audiate in my mind as I am recording, mixing, and mastering.
Are you looking into going to school for music or audio engineering? Let me know if you have any questions! Have you already gone to a studio school? What was your experience? Let me know!
