Formal Qualifications

L

lilhermiejobo

Member
Mar 6, 2007
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How many of you have them [certificates / diplomas / degrees / masters] ?
Also, have those of you with formal qualifications found them to be of much help in gaining work experience/placement/etc within the audio/music industry?

Alternatively, how many of you are active professionals in the audio/music industry without having any formal qualifications? Do you freelance or are you employed by someone else?

Cheers, everyone :kickass:
 
I've a diploma from RMIT. It's got me a few opportunities I otherwise wouldn't have but, for the most part, it's not much of a help. Doing the qualifications however, can get you access to some great gear and mentors that you otherwise wouldn't have access to so early on in your career. Otherwise if you're driven enough, you can make it work without spending the money or the years of your life. There's no right or wrong way. Australia does have a lot of opportunities for government subsidisation of courses though which is super handy.
 
No degree or certification in anything. My primary gigs are live sound stuff. I've been dicking with music shit for more than 10 years now and I'll be 30 this year. I should have been doing this stuff professionally a long time ago as I feel I am getting too old to just now be trying to find a career. It's feast or famine work which is bullshit. I'm hired by two different companies and freelance whenever I get a call for work.

I would rather be making records, but it's fucking tough getting bands to cough up cash.



With that said, I strongly regret not pursing my tech/software interests. I no doubt would be in a better place today if I stuck with it. I got really really sidetracked being in bands since I was a teenager.
 
I have a degree in Music Technology and the sonic arts which is a science degree not an arts degree, but it is still absolute bullshit. I called a few studios six months before term started and i moved to the city where the university is. I got my foot in the door two months before i had done one class of uni and i could have easily not attended the rest of the uni degree, but that means i would've stopped getting student loans which really helped me during the first while at the studio.

But apart from the loans it's all about getting you foot in the door first.
 
Thanks for responding, guys :) It's interesting to see the different paths you've taken.
The reason for this thread is that I'm about to start a degree and was curious to see how beneficial others may have found it. Something I'm pretty excited about is the recent introduction of an internship/placement towards the end of the degree to get my foot in industry's door, so to speak. I've been doing the music thing, almost literally, my entire life and independently learning the audio side of things for, probably, the last 10 years or so. The reoccurring theme I notice with everyone I speak to, seems to be carpe diem.
I'm pretty stoked about getting to work with the top-end gear and gain insights from the professors (active in industry, rather than just teaching out of books, etc) as well as the internship and networking/collab opportunities, etc...
I don't think it's ever too late to progress or develop in this life, really. I mean, quite literally, the only time it's truly too late is when we're dead.
 
Ermz, do you feel that you walked away having gained anything from the degree? (knowledge, experience, insight, network connections, etc)
Which school did you go through?
I've gotta admit, I am looking forward to getting student discounts :)
 
I have a Bachelor's Degree in Music- and Sound Engineering. It got my foot in the door and got offered a job at the biggest studio in The Faroes when I was done. I also learned a lot. Two and a half years on I don't think I'll have great need for the degree again because my studio experience outweighs it, but it's always nice to have a diploma.
 
I have a Bachelors in Audio Technology - it wasn't all sound engineering it was mostly programming bad synths, learning ambisonic decoding etc after two years basic audio engineering but I still never learnt anything really all that practical - it's useful if you want to get a job in education somewhere down the line though - the education industry has to in some capacity deduct some form of merit from its respective output even if no one else in the competitive market will (and they really won't from an AE course) - a degree can get you a job teaching people if you also have the right practical experience and are a suitable age. As it stands I work as a tech guy in the creative dept of a college and I will say you have to leverage the whole thing on experience mostly - in many respects I was lucky to get employed at all because, lets be honest, no one wants to employ the pimple nosed kid fresh out of uni waving a piece of paper and, to tell the truth, that was who I was but I chanced my arm on whatever applicable industry experience I had to shout about at the time which has done me a lot of favours financially and resources wise than say if I was stacking shelves.

On that note I think more importantly doing a degree buys you four years of dicking around in sound, its worth just winging through the qualifications side as much as possible (and by this I mean the box ticking mantra that clouds chances for actual practical experience in checklists and wasted theory) and using all the spare time you will have to crank up your respective output so you actually have something to talk about when you've finished and not just a piece of paper which, in this climate, will buy you absolutely nothing on its own. Jobs in this market are practically non-existent so if this is the route you have chosen, and it sounds like it, you are going to have to be industrious above all as well as flexible and be able to isolate yourself from the bullshit to go for broke when you need to.

In many aspects its not that rewarding, out of everyone here thats a relative success I think you'll find if most had buried their respective work hours into something more practical there would be a lot of people here making six figures.
 
I got a certificate thing from the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Science in Arizona. I guess you could call it an associates degree. More like a tech school than an actual university. Used that to get my internship at a studio. Learned a SHIT ton about audio, pro tools, signal flow, etc. Used my internship to get the foot in the door, now I'm the house engineer there and also freelance.

Probably wouldn't do school though if I had to do it over again. Even though I loved it, I still have $10,000 in student loans left to pay off.
 
I got a BA in Sonic Arts.

Everytime I tell anyone - even in the audio industry - that this is what I have, they look at me and go "what the fuck is that?"
 
mva801 said:
I got a certificate thing from the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Science in Arizona. I guess you could call it an associates degree. More like a tech school than an actual university. Used that to get my internship at a studio. Learned a SHIT ton about audio, pro tools, signal flow, etc. Used my internship to get the foot in the door, now I'm the house engineer there and also freelance.

Probably wouldn't do school though if I had to do it over again. Even though I loved it, I still have $10,000 in student loans left to pay off.
Click to expand...

Damn
I basically have the same degree (associates in applied science) for audio engineering and it hasn't gotten me shit :lol:
 
drew_drummer said:
I got a BA in Sonic Arts.

Everytime I tell anyone - even in the audio industry - that this is what I have, they look at me and go "what the fuck is that?"
Click to expand...

Maybe the Latin Language students will :)

Personally, I have a degree, but from a completely different field (IT). But in a way, I think the IT degree has helped in some things regarding audio in general, mostly the theory behind effects etc. But as for mixing, not so much really. Maybe phase theory and electronics in general, and audio format theory (differential equations, bit depth, amplitude, sample rate and such...).

Everything else I've learnt through this forum and hands-on practice.
 
Sloan said:
No degree or certification in anything. My primary gigs are live sound stuff. I've been dicking with music shit for more than 10 years now and I'll be 30 this year. I should have been doing this stuff professionally a long time ago as I feel I am getting too old to just now be trying to find a career.

I got really really sidetracked being in bands since I was a teenager.
Click to expand...

I totally know this feeling. I seriously wish I had gotten into mixing when I was still in highschool. Back then, I had zero clue as to what I wanted to do with my life, ended up dropping out of highschool like a total retard....made some pretty poor decisions and this year I'll be 32 and still no solid "career" at all.
 
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