Recording Technology

Photo of Control Room B
Control Room B

Cedar Valley college can start you on a successful career track. Whether your interest is in pursuing a career as a recording engineer or you simply want to take a few courses, CVC will provide you with the technical and music skills necessary in the recording field.

Recording Labs at Cedar Valley are small with a large percentage of "one-on-one" instruction. Students enrolled in the Associate degree program typically will engineer three major recording projects from the beginning to the end of the program with approximately 30 hours of studio time per project.

Recording students have the opportunity to:

Learn the basics of music, acoustics and electronics
Engineer studio sessions
Produce live sound for concerts
Perform in ensembles
Produce commercials and jingles
Learn about the business of music and recording

Career Opportunities

There will always be a need for trained, competent professionals in almost any market, and this is especially true for sound and recording engineers in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Commercials, film, live sound, broadcasting and multi-media industrial shows are all areas needing recording engineers who can pull together the creative and technical sides of a production.

The Equipment

Cedar Valley's two control rooms are both equipped with a pair of Tascam DA-88 digital eight-track recorders providing up to sixteen tracks of tape based digital audio in each control room. Control Room A also has the Digidesign ProTools Mix Plus 24 hardware/software sixty four-track digital audio workstation with the Waves Gold Bundle of digital effects plugs and a 1-inch Tascam analog sixteen-track tape machine with DBX noise reduction, SMPTE sync and an auto-locator. All are synchronized together using SMPTE and MMC. Control Room B also has the Digidesign ProTools Digi 001 twenty-four track digital audio workstation. The console in Control Room A is the 72 channel, fully automated Mackie Digital 8-Bus console. The console in Control Room B is a Mackie 16x8x2 analog console. Monitors used in both control rooms include Tannoy, Altec, and Yamaha. The two-track tape machines are Panasonic SV 3700 DAT recorders and Revox PR-99 ¼" analog recorders. Auxiliary signal processing includes Lexicon and Alesis effects processors, PreSonus mic-preamps and compressors, an Eventide Harmonizer and an Orban dual-channel compressor. Microphones are by AKG, Neumann, Sony, Shure, EV, Beyer, Sennheiser, B&O, Crown, and Pearl. The mics include small and large diaphragm condensers, dynamic and ribbon types in all common polar patterns. Test equipment includes oscilloscopes, audio signal generators, harmonic distortion analyzers, audio voltmeters and multimeters, real-time audio spectrum analyzers, and sound meters.

Also available in the commercial Music area is a well-equipped MIDI-based synthesizer lab with several workstations for computerized sequencing and hard disk based multitrack digital audio recording and editing. Computers include both Macintosh and PC. Software programs include Cakewalk, Finale 2000, Sound Forge, and ProTools. In addition to the two Digidesign ProTools systems in the Recording Area, the Midi Lab features two Digidesign ProTools Digi 001 twenty-four track digital audio/midi-sequencing workstations. There are a variety of synthesizers in the Midi Lab including one Yamaha EX-5, one Yamaha DX-7, several EMU Proteus synthesizers, an Alesis sound module and a Roland sound module.

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