Ricky Spidalieri
Professor Gordon
Unit 1 Narrative Essay
Focused Inquiry 112
Music is the universal language and one I’m religiously fluent in. My love for
music has guided my path through life and led me to do whatever I could to always make
it there. In my junior year of high school, I spent half of my day, everyday, for a year,
travelling to a nearby music center to learn the ins and outs of the music industry and
technology. At the time, I knew that I wanted to work in music, but was unsure as to what
exactly I wanted to do. On the first day of class we went over the syllabus and did
standard “get to know you” activities that I dread, but in the last forty-five minutes of
class we went into the studio to talk about the equipment.
While in the control room, our teacher told us that this class would be notetaking- like a standard class, but it’d have new aspect, a technical one, with a lot of
hands-on interaction, that no class we had taken before would compare to. When he
introduced the class itself like that, I knew that I would love it and that I had started
something special. At this point we had gotten all sixteen of us into the control room, all
cramped in the small eighteen by ten space that still smelled of fresh paint. I stood
awkwardly in a room full of people I didn’t know, trying to see and hear the teacher, but
luckily he was a very vocal and outgoing person, so he carefully jumped on top of the
table with all the equipment on it, and told us that by taking this class, he was going to
ruin music for us forever. He said that by getting so in-depth with the technicality of it,
that we would never see music the same way again. I took this statement more as a
challenge. I told myself that I would take in every single thing said in class and try to
learn something from it and that hopefully in the end, would love music even more.
With the conclusion of his speech, he directed us all into the tracking room, which
was about three times the size of the control room; filled with guitars, amps, a piano, and
a drum set centered on a rug to be the first thing seen when you entered through the large,
heavy steel doors. He circled us around the drums as he sat in the stool and told us to look
around the room. What did we see? Beside the obvious instruments parceled throughout
the room, I noticed the acoustic foam strapped to the wall in several different places. I
saw four large, purple, felt rectangles hanging on the ceiling above the drum set. There
were four large triangular foam pieces shoved into each corner of the room, too. He asked
what we saw and how it was different from a standard practice room we might have
pictured. We questioned the multiple foam pieces around the room, and he told us that
each one had a specific job, which was to give the room it’s own acoustic shape. That
simple answer made me think and cracked my eyes to a glimpse at what audio
engineering really was. It amazed me that by simply adding some foam blocks around the
room, it could change the sound of a seemingly rectangular room as a whole. I realized
how particular things had to be in order to record music properly and that aspect of it
astounded me.
Afterwards, we piled back into the control room for a demonstration of how you
would engineer and produce music. I remember weaving through my classmates to get to
a big black box in the corner of the room to sit on while I stretched across the table to see
the computer screen. He opened a file he had been working on and the control panel
snapped into action. The faders flew into position, the lights flickered, and the speakers
popped. He adjusted the levels and started the track. At that moment I discovered that the
black box I was sitting on was actually a subwoofer. The vibrations carried throughout
my body and reverberated with an overwhelming power. It was intoxicating. He paused
the track and opened up the soundboard window. All the different channels sat idly while
he opened a compressor plug-in. He talked about broadly what a compressor does and
what each knob did, and told us to listen carefully. He soloed the kick drum track that the
compressor was running through and played it. The knobs shifted and with them, the
sound of the drum. It amazed me how much difference it made when listening to it by
itself, but when it was added to the track, the difference was surprisingly subtle if
noticeable at all. He then said, “the minute details are what makes music… what it is,”
and that stuck with me. As a whole, music seems so perfect and centered, but when you
break it down into individual sounds or even frequencies, you realize how much work
and detail goes into making it sound like it does. Just in the first day of class my vision of
music was changed entirely and all for the better.
He closed out the compressor and opened a new plug-in that was foreign to me. It
had several knobs and selection screens on one side; on the other, a little 3-D image of
varying geometric shape, with it set to a cylinder by default. Our teacher told us that this
particular plug-in was called reverb. At the time, reverb was a term I had heard, but
unaware really as to what it was exactly. He soloed a vocal track and pressed play. He
told us, like the compressor, to listen closely to the minute details. He shifted some alien
knobs and picked a few default options on the sliding menu. The voice of the rapper was
then transported to a new location. It sounded as if he was shouting his words in a big
hall, then a small room, a cathedral, then an auditorium. With the manipulation of the
knobs, the voice of the track took on a new sound; a new environment. The concept had
taken a minute for me to really sink in. How could a machine take a sound and recreate it
as if it were originally made somewhere else? The simple thought of the power behind it
all astounded me.
I used to listen to music and categorize it more broadly, which I imagine most
people do. I used to hear a song and just subconsciously categorize it as a song, a sound,
and nothing more really, but after I had a song broken down in front of me, I started to
see the pieces. I saw it as a whole rather than a combination, but that first day of class, I
started to think more in-depth about the music I was listening to. I no longer heard the
song as it was released, but more as how it was made. As if every song I listened to now
had an instruction manual. I heard the tracks as the combination of a snare, kick,
cymbals, guitar, bass, piano, vocals, highlights, ambience, and countless other sounds.
Music always meant everything to me, but in an instant it was changed and the
connection I had was made only stronger. All because of a simple visual and audial
breakdown of a song, my perspective was changed entirely, and it made me love it even
more, despite my teacher’s warning.
I remember after class dismissed, we all meandered out to the bus, all with visibly
new outlooks on music. I took my seat and put in my headphones. I decided that I would
listen to something that I hadn’t listened to in a while, and didn’t particularly like
anymore, just to see if I could find something new in it based off of my newly realized
epiphany. I opened the music app on my iPod and scrolled through over the 100 artists I
had on it to try and add more diversity into my usual routine. What have I not listened to
in a long time? Should I try listening to metal again? I decided to listen to the music I had
listened to in eighth grade, for nostalgia’s sake. I finally decided Avenged Sevenfold’s
‘Beast and the Harlot’ would be my first experiment. It had been at least three years since
I had listened to it simply cause my general taste in music had changed, but this time, I
didn’t just hear the music, I listened. I no longer heard just guitars and drums slamming
away while a man screamed into a microphone. I now heard and could articulate each
individual sound in the song. I could pick out the separate drum tracks: kick, snare, toms,
over-head microphones to capture the crack of cymbals; the guitars, backing, lead, and
bass. I could even at times hear the particular use of reverb or compression. I heard
firsthand, with a song that I was familiar with, the use of effects to make a song whole.
Every song starts as a thought and a blank audio file, but the instruments are the
components that fill the empty space, that make the song whole.
Since I was five and first learned to play the guitar, I have spent my life learning
all that I could about music to become as good as I possibly could be at it instrumentally
and theoretically. Until two years ago I had been seeing the thing I loved through an
invisible haze, but it was cleared entirely in an instant. The simple process of turning on a
program and selecting a file made me aware of a seemingly unknown world to me. It may
seem like a miniscule change, but from my perspective, it really has changed everything
for me. I’ve since formed everything I do around it in hopes of one day becoming a
professional producer and audio engineer. People often search for years for what they
love, but I’ve known it since I was five.