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Home Recording Boot Ccamp
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Ronan Chris Murphy: I started up Home Recording Boot Camp a bit over a year ago. Over the last several years the trend of home recording or musicians recording themselves really started taking off. I really noticed it when I would speak at music conferences and saw every year the number of people approaching and asking me to listen to their self produced CDs growing exponentially. The sad thing is most of these CDs are usually really badly done. Obviously I am a businessman, but first and foremost I am a music fan and its such a bummer to hear a CD by a band or artist that I know could have made a great CD, but put out really mediocre discs. The more I would talk to these people I would realized that they had really gotten bogged down with lots of stuff that was actually hurting their music and totally ignoring things that could really help them make great music.
The more my partner and I talked about it, the more it seemed to make sense for us to launch home recording boot camp. Itıs the kind of thing that could actually help a lot of people, be a lot of fun and be a pretty cool business idea. Its actually pretty fun to make a little bit of money getting to hang out and talk about stuff I love with cool people. Doing these Boot Camps is about 20% of my work these days and I do not think it will get much bigger than that. I love teaching, but I love producing and mixing too much to get out of the game and just teach. Myself and every one that teaches in my boot camps is a working pro with major label credits. We are growing slow and currently do workshops in LA, Seattle and North Italy.
The general idea behind the boot camps is to boil recording down to the most important elements, because a lot of people get side tracked by things that actually get in the way of making great records. We try and focus on the art and craft of recording and try and give students the tools to make the records they really want to make and help them understand the techniques they really need to make that happen. Recording is a lot more simple than people make it out to be. We obviously talk about specific gear, but we try and be format and genre agnostic. We want people to really understand recording so that it does not matter if they are recording bluegrass or punk rock, working on a 4 track cassette or a top of the line pro tools rig. Its about understand recording on a deeper level.
One of the nice surprises for me is that my students have been everything from real beginners to guys with small commercial studios, many times in the same course, and both students seem to get a lot out of the material. In that regard its been more successful than I had expected.
SR: Could you tell us a little about the various studio and locations involved? Any different classes or approaches at the different studios?
RCM: At the moment the three main places that we do Boot Camps are Los Angeles, Washington State and North Italy. The LA courses happen at my own commercial studio, Veneto West, which is a pretty cool funky 1300 square foot one room facility. It's a commercial room, but with a very laid back homey vibe and a good mix of analog and digital equipment and just about 10 minutes from Venice Beach, CA
The Washington State facility is an amazing place about an hour East of Seattle called Paradise Sounds. It's my favorite studio in the world, set in a tiny town in the Cascade Mountains. It's got amazing views and is a gear slut's paradise (no pun intended). G series SSL, Pro Tools HD, 2 Inch Otari, Radar, Grand piano, B3 and a closet full of vintage Neumans. It also has on site accommodations.
In North Italy we have been using a small studio there, but we are moving to something bigger for the next boot camp hopefully in the fall. We are actually looking at a studio built in a small villa in the Hills of Tuscany.
The Material changes slightly in different locations. At Paradise Sound you get to be in a gorgeous location and get a change to play around on some of the best recording gear in the world. In Italy you get to be in Italy!!! with great food and wine. (all the courses are taught in English). The LA courses are actually the least expensive because I own the studio, but aside from being close to the beach we have a wider range of guest instructors and also try and do one or two field trips to cool LA studios. We have engineers and manufactures come in for lectures. The core material is the same no matter where we do the boot camps, but each one has a few different extras.
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