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want. Then do an internship at a studio. Some
people get started by working at small
studios in small towns and gaining hands-on
experience."
RICKY COBBLE, FIRST ENGINEER, LOUD
STUDIOS
Ricky Cobble grew up amid the country music of
eastern Tennessee, and was
always interested in music. At an age when all
his friends were putting together bands,
he knew he wanted to work in recording.
Introduced by a friend to the music
program at Belmont University, he moved to
Nashville to attend classes and ended up
serving an internship at Quad Studios. He
started out doing the things that nobody
else wanted to do: answering the telephone,
making coffee, watching the door, and
working the night shift. Soon he was setting up
microphones and assisting the second
sound engineer. More importantly, he was
getting the opportunity to observe the
recording process and see how the producers and
engineers worked. When his intern-
ship was finished, Cobble was hired as house
assistant, charged with the technical
aspects of interfacing the studio's equipment
with the additional equipment brought
in by engineers for specific recording
sessions.
During his four years at Quad, Cobble developed
relationships with the recording
teams there. When several of these people
started up Loud Studios in 1994, he was
brought in as house assistant, and quickly
worked his way up to the second position.
As second engineer, Cobble has worked with
artists like Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, and
Randy Travis, as well as with top-notch
producers like James Stroud. He broke into
the first engineer position by tracking and
mixing for several developing artists, and
landed his first major session in 1999 by being
in the right place at the right time.
When a flight delay stranded the first engineer
in Hawaii, Cobble stepped into the
position at the last minute to record tracks
for a Clint Black album. Cobble has since
engineered on albums for Faith Hill, Toby
Keith, and Montgomery Gentry.
MASTERING ENGINEER
JOB OVERVIEW
Mastering is the final creative step in the
recording process before the manufac-
ture of a CD, DVD, cassette, record, or any
other format that is released to the public.
It is the process of transferring recorded
sounds that are stored on a master tape, to a
lacquer disc (or master disc) for the purpose
of manufacturing recordings. "Imagine
being in the studio, mixing, being finished
with the recording and listening back to
your mixes," says Denny Purcell. "The producer
and artist have a picture in their
minds of how they want the recording to sound
to the public, which they lined up
song by song. The mastering engineer makes that
possible. The sound, time between
songs, the volume of each song; we make the
record palatable for the public."
CASE STUDY:
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