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Issue #88

Weekly Newsletter

by L. Swift and Jeff McQ

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Student Successes


When Jimi and Brian get you working on the job, you can begin to see life-changing milestones for your new career!
Read below about an apprentice who not only got hired at a prestigious L.A. studio, but recently won a coveted
Pensado Award for his efforts!

Student Successes orlando-header

Recording Connection student Jake Kiyokane wins prestigious Pensado AIR Award!

    To say it’s been a great year for Recording Connection master’s student Jake Kiyokane would be an understatement. As we shared in our July 6th newsletter, Jake’s passion and commitment recently landed him a position at his mentor’s studio, Serenity West in Los Angeles, CA. But then he got word that he’d received a nomination for the Pensado Awards, an annual event hosted by Grammy-winning industry veteran Dave Pensado acknowledging excellence in the recording industry arts. At the ceremony held August 30th at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City—Jake won the Pensado AIR Award for Best Assistant, Intern or Runner!   Shortly after he received the honor, we caught up with Jake to chat about this recent milestone in his emerging career.     RRFC: How did you find out that you were nominated for a Pensado Award?   Jake Kiyokane: Somebody texted me, and they were like, “Congratulations.” I was like, “Oh, what are you talking about?” and then they let me know. And then I found the email saying, “Congratulations. You’ve been nominated!”   RRFC: What do you think it was about your work ethic that set you in the running for the award?   Jake: Just my dedication. I was loyal. I’d be there hardworking, every day. I’ll stay there as long as they need to and help out if they need it. I think they just noticed my effort. I think that’s what got it. I wouldn’t say I’m a really good engineer or anything yet. I know all the basics. I think I’m a very quick learner and I can handle my own. I’m very responsible. I think that they just noticed all that.   RRFC: Did you get a chance to meet any big names, rub elbows with anybody at the awards?  
Jake Kiyokane and Randy Jackson

Producer Randy Jackson and Jake Kiyokane, Pensado Awards 2015.

Jake: Yeah. I met Young Guru there. It was great talking to him because he was one of the first people I watched, audio engineering videos, like tutorials…it was great to talk to him in person. And I met Randy Jackson that was cool…I met a few other people like the guy from Ableton. He was really nice. Yeah, there was a lot of people there.   RRFC: And did any of these guys give you any advice? Were you able to pick their brain at all? You mentioned Young Guru, and you guys talked for a little bit.   Jake: Yeah, I was telling him I’m a big fan of his, and we were talking about just what music he liked. I was talking about his production…what was his favorite thing to do in the studio or who was his favorite artist and all that.   RRFC: How did it feel to hear that you had actually won the award?   Jake: When I actually won, it was pretty surreal, it felt like a dream almost. Because I’ve never really had to make a speech like that or won an award, that extent. So it was definitely different.   RRFC: Did you do a slow walk to the podium, trying to think about what you were going to say?   Jake: Most of the award show, when I was sitting there, I was thinking, “Crap. What am I going to say if I actually do get picked?” I think I was walking a little slow because the manager of Serenity West [Cameell Hanna], he decided to come up with me. I think he saw I was a little nervous walking up there, so he gave me a little bit of back up.   RRFC: Did you get a chance to thank your family and everything like that?   Jake: Yeah, I thanked my family…I got my parents, they were the ones that paid for everything, let me skip work if I needed to. So, yeah, they’re the ones I needed to thank, and then, of course, Recording Connection. They were the first ones I think I thanked. I wouldn’t be here without them. I know a few other people who’ve gone to audio schools, and it doesn’t seem like it worked the same for them. They would just go to school. And I know a lot of them are working just other places, they don’t have any studio jobs or anything yet. I probably had the least experience out of all of them, and I joined this program, and I was in the studio within a week, just learning. And now I’m running sessions. So it’s pretty great. So I would say Recording Connection is definitely a big part of why I’m here.   RRFC: That’s awesome. But how much of it is your own personal responsibility as well?  
Jake Kiyokane

Jake Kiyokane

Jake: Yeah, that’s the other half because there a lot of kids in the Recording Connection. So the other half is you’ve got to put in your effort. You have to show the studio you’re actually going to show up, you’re going to be there, you’re going to work hard, and you know your stuff.   RRFC: How do you like it over there at Serenity West?   Jake: It’s great. I love them. They’re like family now.   RRFC: And how have you improved since you started the program?   Jake: Things are coming to me easier. It’s not like I have to think about it as much. Just going through signal flow, I know how to hook up all the mics together, take it down properly, shut down the studio. It’s become almost habit. I don’t really have to think about it. Yeah, it’s all in the brain.   RRFC: Where would you like to see yourself down the road, now that you are an award winning assistant runner? Spin some goals for yourself.   Jake: As of right now, I’m not sure which direction I really want to take as an engineer yet. I’m still just going with it, going along with the ride. So I’ll probably see which direction I’ll probably take, if I want to do just tracking, or mixing, or all that. But I think my end goal, at the very end, I want to own a studio. I think that would be really cool.    



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Apprentices in Action

Here’s what some RRFC Apprentices
have been up to!

    
William Crutchfield

William Crutchfield

The people over at The Abstract Recording Studios (Los Angeles, CA) have been producing music cues for The Discovery Channel and also TLC. Turns out, Recording Connection student, William Crutchfield has placed the most pieces of music out of any of the team! Congrats William!    Danni Winn Thanks to her passion for writing for cinema, Film Connection student and horror film aficionado Danni Winn (San Antonio, TX) just completed coverage for not one, but two amazing film festivals: MondoCon 2015, featuring artists, creators, panels, screenings and more; and Fantastic Fest 2015, the largest horror/fantasy/sci-fi film festival in the U.S.!   
Kayli Mills

Kayli Mills

Thanks to the skills she’s learning through Recording Connection, voice actress Kayli Mills (Grand Rapids, MI) was able to produce her own character demo reel. And it got her noticed! We’re proud to announce Kayli is now the voice of the evil, psychotic Nitro in the AAA game “Heroes of Newerth.” Congrats, Kayli!   

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Whether your musical interests are in rock, country, hip-hop, beat making, electronic music production or live audio engineering, the Recording Connection can tailor your apprenticeship to help you achieve your goals!

Genres!

The Recording Connection partners with mentors all over the world who specialize in every genre imaginable. Just tell us your genre of choice, and we will pair you with the right mentor for you!




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Mentor News
  Recording Connection mentor Kevin McCarthy, owner and chief producer/engineer at Cityview Recording in Salem, Oregon, has an interesting take on apprenticing students for the music industry. Also an accomplished singer/songwriter and musician, Kevin has more than three decades of experience on both sides of the glass, having opened for Jefferson Starship, performed onstage with Buddy Jewell, Julie Roberts and the late Rod Price (of Foghat), and recorded and mixed for such clients as Amy Clausen, Lonesome Road and Deen Castronovo (Journey).   As such, Kevin takes a particularly musical, well-rounded approach to teaching his apprentices. In the excerpts below, taken from a recent conversation we had with him, you can see he’s all about his students and preparing them for the music industry! He also has some very cool things to say about the Recording Connection master’s program, as well as the level of passion it takes to make it in this business. Some very insightful and even vulnerable moments ahead, so read on!    
RC Mentor Kevin McCarthy

RC Mentor Kevin McCarthy

ABOUT HIS PARTICULAR SPIN ON APPRENTICING PRODUCERS AND ENGINEERS:   “I think that a lot of engineers are musicians first and songwriters and I’ve had some success at that, and as I built a studio for myself, I began to get other people coming in and I was recording them… So song structure is really a lot of what I teach as well, because I’m a musician and songwriter first, and the studio came out of that. So now I have to play both first and second base in that we have to be able to put the songs together and have good structure with the songs and tracking them, and then also be able to work in post and make sure that what we really had as a conception comes to fruition…I think that a lot of people really want to be here just because of my success in terms of songwriting and radio play.”   ON WHAT HE SPECIFICALLY TRIES TO IMPART TO HIS STUDENTS:   So I want the students to understand that they are at the threshold of a new era in that those changes have been made and have… have literally become permanent where we’re pulling tape out and we’re using emulations of things that are so good that nobody’s using tape anymore. So that’s what I want them to understand when they’re looking at their setups and their own personal setups that… here’s the example at Cityview Recording. Use this as a blueprint and a map to continue building your own scenario and to understand… So that gives them an edge, so they come in and don’t have a blank look on their face when they enter another studio and see exactly what’s going on. They’re going to know because they saw us do it at Cityview.   HIS THOUGHTS ON THE KIND OF PASSION REQUIRED TO MAKE IT IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY:  
Control Room in Cityview Recording

Control Room in Cityview Recording

“If you don’t love this, it’s not going to happen….At some point in time you’ve got to separate your infatuation from it and become obsessed with it. And if you look at all the big guys, from Schultz to Pensado, CLA, JJP, Al Schmitt, all these top guys, and there are many others…these guys, like me, you can’t stop us: we’re going to do it whether it’s cool or not. I love… what is most fascinating about it to me is that we take all of these pieces, which we now at Cityview capture so eloquently with this incredible outboard equipment and mic collection that we have, and then we go to post and we make it happen, and we make it sound like you really feel we ought to make it sound. And I can feel it, you know—it’s not a matter of numbers, it’s a ‘how does make me feel when I’m mixing it?’ And when I get it mixed, that really is what drives me. It’s like making a cake: you just want that cake to be the best cake you ever, ever tasted, and that is every session, every song, and it drives me. I consider myself very lucky.   “…You know, a lot of guys say they’re all wanting to be engineers and blah, blah, blah, but I really think that, you know, there’s talk and there’s do. And my students are in the “do” mode where they’ve invested in their education and they’re… they’ve come here and they’re working really hard with me to pass these exams and sometimes I have to help them a little bit, but we’ve got some pretty strong students here who are really getting it down, and I’m very proud of them.”   BRAGGING ON SOME OF HIS STAR APPRENTICES:   “I’m pretty proud of almost of all of them. I’ve got Carson Sykes who has graduated and has his start; I’ve got that in his file, he’s down in Los Angeles now at a pretty big studio…Dan Cobos, he’s almost on the last lesson… Cobos wants to be on the Master’s program…Austin House has been spectacular, his grades are just, he’s almost straight A. Ramiro Garcia is really, really, really good as well…Taylor Sewell…I’ve got some students that are really surprising me.”   ON WHY HE THINKS STUDENTS NEED TO CONTINUE BEYOND THE BASIC APPRENTICESHIP PROGRAM INTO THE MASTER’S PROGRAM:   “These kids need to move on to the master’s program because the master’s program is really where you get to a point where you could be a more important component in a tracking session, setup, those types of things. The basics are excellent with the associates program, but the master’s program…is pretty much what I do every day, so these kids will… these kids I think will benefit greatly from it.”   ON WHY HE ENDORSES RRF’S MENTOR-APPRENTICE APPROACH OVER TRADITIONAL EDUCATION:   “I just think it’s way better, the students at RRF are getting an education they just wouldn’t get any other way. When they’re here, we’re actually recording records. And I’m also a producer, songwriter, and a lot of my clients literally come to me to help them perfect their songs that they’ve put together, and I think the students really get to see something more than just an engineer sitting here, they’re watching a songwriter at work and a tracking expert at work, and then we go to mix, and post is always fun because it’s… they get to look at the back of my head for a long time! [laughter] …These guys at RRF have been good to me…it’s been fantastic knowing these guys and quite frankly, I was very honored to have been the guy that they chose in this area.”   



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Apprentice Media


Check out this work by RRFC apprentices!

Apprentice Media


     

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Quotes from Students:
 



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