And I was watching them all the time. At first, he says, the music was pretty much just music-until he began to listen a little more closely. The stuff I was listening to wasn't so smooth. It had texture. That's when I really started studying sound.
Sound engineers enjoy a special kind of power.
They come to the music long after the lyrics are written, after the notes are mapped out, and can change a melody's mood entirely. With the flick of a switch, they can make a note hiss, echo, thud-or do none of those things. Sometimes the tweaks are so subtle that the average listener can barely detect them. In fact, most of what the sound engineer does is get into our subconscious, making us feel like we're listening to the music in an intimate caf or a crowded stadium-or at home in our living room. In search of vintage equipment, he started reading classified ads and calling radio stations, which usually were thrilled to make a few bucks off old microphone preamplifiers and tube compressors lying around in their basements.