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Top Recording Schools Add MiLaR to Curriculum

Mix It Like a Record, an interactive mixing course authored by Grammy-winning engineer, mixer and producer Charles Dye and produced by Kagi Media, has been added to the curriculum at several well-known recording schools and colleges across the country.

Mix It Like a Record is a DVD/Pro Tools session–based mixing course taught by Dye (Lauryn Hill, Jon Bon Jovi, Sammy Hagar, Julio Iglesias) and takes the student into the studio and out on location to teach how to get record-quality mixes using the latest plug-ins, how to breathe emotion into the music with automation and much more. The in-depth DVD features more than three hours of video instruction and 1.7 GB of 40 Pro Tools TDM and LE sessions.

“For years, books and magazines have tried to convey the art of mixing,” says Chris Davie, director of SAE Institute in Miami (www.sae-miami.com), and engineer and mixer (Vince Gill, George Strait, Wynonna Judd, Trisha Yearwood). “Mix It Like a Record’s format goes one step further by bringing the viewer directly into the mix with techniques, discussions and practice sessions. In our educational environment, it’s the perfect resource.”

Mix It Like a Record is also being used at The Art Institute of Seattle (www.ais.edu), which offers an AAA degree in Audio Production. According to Steve Barsotti, academic director of Audio Production, the school uses the DVD to bring together the concepts of mixing that are dissected throughout the course of a term so that students can experience a professional result in one sitting. “The students really get a lot out of hearing the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle!) changes that occur within Charles’ plug-in chains,” comments Barsotti. “This is a field that has a history of learning from observing the masters, and our students have benefited from the experience of Charles Dye by using this DVD presentation.”

In a different approach, pro audio educator and founder of Future Rhythm Pro School, engineer, producer and composer Bruce Tambling teaches a mixing course at Foothill College (www.foothill.edu/musictechnology) in San Francisco based entirely on Mix It Like a Record. The required “text” is the DVD, which students purchase from Foothill’s book store. Tambling breaks up the video chapters over eight sessions as the curriculum for the class, and installs the accompanying Pro Tools sessions on the 35 student Pro Tools LE/Mac G5 systems to support the hands-on approach he feels is vital in learning mixing. “The type of information in Mix It Like a Record was previously available only to people that were fortunate enough to receive an apprenticeship at a major recording studio,” says Tambling. “It would literally take years for students to gain this much knowledge on their own through trial-and-error in their own home studios trying to re-invent the wheel.”

At Los Angeles–based AudioGraph International (www.audiographintl.com), a Spanish Pro Tools Certified Training Center, the “Mixing With Pro Tools” course uses both the video portion of Mix It Like a Record for in-class support and the Pro Tools sessions for practice assignments. “Mix It Like a Record is an amazing audio/visual learning tool,” says José “Chilitos” Valenzuela, founder of AudioGraph and author of The Complete Pro Tools Handbook and The Complete Pro Tools Shortcuts, as well as an engineer and mixer (Keith Emerson, John Waite, Colin Hay, Tony Kanal). “I use it in a way that allows my students to more easily comprehend and apply specific lessons from class. I explain it, they watch the chapter on the DVD and then they do it. It really works!”

To find out more about Mix It Like a Record, visit www.harddisklife.com.

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