Music Production Student at Dark Horse Institute – “Mikey” Gilmor

When I was about 14 years old I began to get into recording audio. I had a 7 channel mixer and an old dual cassette deck recorder that I recorded my personal guitar tracks with. Shortly after that I upgraded to an old laptop and downloaded Audacity for free and thought it was the coolest thing in the world; being able to edit and layer more than one track at a time. It wasn’t too long after that when I purchased Cubase and became fully impressed with the flexibility of the software. I have been using Cubase along with an array of gear and mixers of my own for about 8 years now. I decided to come to Dark Horse Institute to fine tune my skills as a recording engineer, to better understand the equipment I am using, and to learn Pro Tools first hand from the pros.

I started this course expecting to only be fine tuning my skills and knowledge of audio engineering, but what i’ve gotten so far from DHI has been so much more than I expected. There hasn’t been a single day at Dark Horse in the two months I’ve been here that I haven’t learned something new. I have already learned more here than I was able to teach myself at home over an eight year period. From setting up and tearing down sessions on our first day in the studio to creating our own edits and mix’s using the same tools as the pros the way there meant to be used. The instructors here at DHI do an excellent job making sure the information given through each lesson and course is understood by the entire class as a whole.

This past week we covered how to properly utilized the functions of Beat Detective, Elastic Audio, Melodyne, and Auto Tune. These are some of the most reputable and professional plugins available in the Digital Audio world and to have learned as much about them in the course of one week, as we have, is just phenomenal. We’re given a pre recorded un-edited version of a session at the beginning of the week and each day is a new lesson on what we could do to this next or how we could edit this more professionally. We work at our own pace as needed and whenever you have a question, the instructors know exactly what you meant, why you were confused, and what your solution is. We have been working with these plugins for a week and some of them less than that but already I feel as though anyone in this class could use them professionally as of now. The instructors have a certain way of just cruising right along from lesson to lesson without leaving anyone behind. As students we are given a wealth of information on a new topic almost every single morning. By the time we get back from lunch that same day we are all prepared and capable of properly utilizing the functions of whatever it may have been that we learned that day. I couldn’t have imagined the pace at which this class is moving, but due to the effectiveness of our instructors teaching methods, there has yet to be a need to slow things down. I have always been a hands on learner and thats exactly what this is, hands on learning. I couldn’t imagine learning about audio engineering from anywhere else.