Just before Christmas there, my services were requested by a company that deals with translations and interpreters. The job was a 1600 word document to be translated into 6 different languages and recorded onto CD. Obviously I wouldn’t be doing the translations, as my Franglish is “trés bad”.
With my sister being a keen linguist, speaking four languages, and me being a sound engineer in need of any work going, the job description appealed to me quite a bit. I used to take French and Spanish lessons at school and oddly enough I managed to get an A in Highers and fail English (So naturally, we gave Jamie a job as a writer – Ed.)
The job seems quite easy in theory: set up a vocal mic, hit record, print to CD, hit the pub. It also meant that I’d only need to carry a fraction of my recording gear around with me, and with no driving licence, that’s always good news. Win/win right?
Wrong.
The major problem I have with being a skint sound engineer is the lack of a quiet room. It might not seem like a huge problem to find one, but when it comes to recording with ultra-sensitive microphones, it doesn’t take long to discover that a room is much louder than first thought.
For the job, I was allocated a space in an empty classroom at the other side of the main road, in the hopes that being as far away as possible would eliminate the sound of traffic noise from the recording. For the most part it worked out well, but recording just the one instrument leaves you very exposed: it’s not like recording a band where the drums alone will cover a large majority of the frequency spectrum. You can afford to be a bit lenient in that sense. However, this was a purely vocal recording, so as a result the Glasgow buses, fire engines, helicopters and the man who shouted down the street to his mate about Christmas Eve plans for 10 minutes had a field day with it.
A couple of years ago, one of my lecturers told me a great rule of recording: “if you record shite, all you can do in the mixing process is polish it. But at the end of the day, it‘s still shite isn‘t it?”
Probably not one to be found on those inspirational posters with the beautiful landscapes found in offices, but still something that should be taken into consideration nonetheless.
It’s a shame really, because when someone pays you good money to do something right, you want to do it right. While I did manage to scavenge something from the recordings in the mixing process, ultimately I kept thinking how much easier this all would have been if I could afford a place with some peace and quiet.
And to top it all off, the big freeze meant that all trains from Glasgow Central were subsequently cancelled, leaving me and my gear stuck in town for 3 hours until I could find a bus that wasn’t packed like a tin of sardines.
So the moral of my story? Something to do with turds, irony and sod’s law I expect. Je te dis mes amis, mon anglais est mal. C’est la vie.
Jamie Hewitt is a musician and producer based in Dundee. 
