So, what is your jam? What music gets your groove on? Irrespective of your music choices, you should know that audio engineering is a crucial part of music production. Without audio engineering, we might not have loved the music of legends such as Billy Joel, Boston, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Eric Clapton and pretty much every other music greats.
Over the years, there have been many audio engineers whose works in the field have made them famous. In some cases, they are considered to be as legendary as the musicians they helped become legends.
Source: Tape Op
Take Joe Meek for example. He is considered to be the single most important contributor to the development of modern audio. His approach towards recording technologies showed him to be years ahead of his time. In fact, his developments and innovation have become commonplace in the recording industry even though they were considered to be radical at one point. He was responsible for the elimination of room sounds and bringing the musicians and the microphones closer to each other. This is still followed today.
Source: Atlantic Records
Another legend was Tom Dowd. This guy was a major badass. Dowd was a physicist in the Manhattan Project and helped create the atomic bomb. However, he ended up becoming an audio engineer and producer who worked with Eric Clapton, the Eagles, Ray Charles and Cream apart from a host of other legends. He was responsible for making multi-track recording and stereophonic sound popular. He was the pioneer who made linear channel faders more common. A badass indeed.
Source: Ultimate Classic Rock
Tom Scholz may be better known for his band, Boston, but he started off as an audio engineer and his work in that field is still considered amazing. He invented the Rockman headphone amp and the Power Soak. Both of these are still used widely by other musicians.
If it weren’t for the mad audio engineering of these boy wonders, who knows what kind of under-the-rock music we are enjoying today.
