Does anyone hire assistants these days?

[dynomike]

I'd like to work as an assistant at a good studio to 'learn from the best'. I have been running my own studio full-time for 3 years (just closed shop 2 weeks ago), and have also interned at a few other studios. I would hope that's enough experience to get me in the door somewhere. Where should I start looking for assisting opportunities?

Right now I'm digging through my record collection and compiling a list of engineers whose work I like, and trying to get in touch with them. Should I be aiming to contact the engineers themselves, or studio owners... ?

Any help or advice would be appreciated. I'm open to moving, if the opportunity is right.

-Mike

[ott0bot]

I'm no expert and have never owned or ran a studio myself. Just a lowly intern who has on occasion brought in a few clients to the studio, mostly recording at home.

but....
A couple people I know have recently moved out of their home studios and partnered with larger more established places. Usually bringing all their gear into the mix, plus the list of clients to boot. It seems that most places only want you there if you bring in money and/or gear they don't already have. Also on occasion your services would be requested to help the studio partners on a project and being paid in a hourly or daily rate. Then with the money you earn you help pay the bills keeping whatever profit you make over that. Basically a freelance position with full use of the studio, not having to rent the studio, but being responsible for the bills too.

Maybe I'm wrong and there are some decent paying, non-freelance work out there...but after interning for a while it seems like those days are gone for the most part. There are plenty of people willing to intern and the studions I've been around can't afford to hire anyone unless they are bringing in a client. If it's not profitable I don't see why they would do it, especially these days.

this is based on observation and opinion only.....not a statement of fact. I'd be interested to hear what experience others have had, because mine hasn't been too reassuring of my career choice. Also, this is a reccession...so hopefully things change....but I've never been much of an optimist.

[Anthony Caruso]

Contact studio managers for staff positions. Contact individual engineers to see if they are looking for help. You're on the right track with pursuing people/places that have done things you admire. But...

The catch with studios is if you have no assisting experience (regardless of running your own studio for 3 years) any studio that actually has staff assistants is less likely to hire you straight out as an assistant. You'd probably have to be a runner first. Don't intern. Internships are for college kids on summer vacation, and they are working in exchange for credits. Get paid, even if it's minimum wage.

Finding an individual engineer to assist isn't impossible. The catch there is how do you get paid? An engineer who is working out of his own place may not need/be able to afford an assistant except on certain projects. If an engineer is working mainly out of commercial studios or places other than their own, the room may very well come with a staff assistant as part of the price. But contact all those people you'd like to work with. The worst that can happen is they say no. And if they are an asshole about it, you wouldn't want to work with them anyway.

If you had to make a choice between the 2, I would consider:
-being staff at a studio will expose you to more people/techniques/scenarios. It can also be a hectic and life-enveloping job.
-assisting 1 engineer will give you great insight as to their way of doing it, but not much else. Are you assisting someone with 20 or 30 years of broad experience that you can mine or someone who has just done a couple cool records?
-I have gotten and continue to get gigs from engineers I assisted at the studio I worked at. It is the ultimate real way to show them what you can do and if your personalities click.
-I am envisioning my self as an engineer worth assisting. I need an assistant for a project. Do I pick the random person who emailed me (in this vision I get lots of those emails, I am the fucking shit!!!) or do I call the assistant who helped me have a smooth and efficient session last time I was at studio X whom I know also loves "The Wire", so we can spend downtime saying "Sheeeeeeeeeeeiiiit!" and laughing our asses off? I'd probably go with person I knew.

I kind of did both in 1 by luck. I ran at a studio for a year, got a break and ended up assisting one producer/engineer team there for 13 months. Then I spent a year and a half assisting whatever sessions I was assigned by the studio. I can genuinely say I learned a ton from the "single team for a long time" scenario but after about 6 months I got the bag of tricks. When he would say we were doing drums I just went to the locker and got "the drum mics", same way every time. In the period that I was just a general assistant I worked with all kinds of different people on all kinds of sessions: tracking, mixing, "makin' beats", whatever came in. Different setups, different techniques, different personalities, never stagnant but also more random and unpredictable, etc. Learned a lot from that, but maybe didn't get to see every intricacy of people's methods. Pros and cons, you know?

As far as "they only want you if you bring in business", I guess that depends on the place. The place I worked already had a strong reputation/clientele. They definitely took notice that I was doing a good job when clients requested me everytime, said specific good things about me, and most importantly kept coming back. I may have not been bringing in business (no one I know could afford it!) but I was keeping regular clients happy. And that led to the studio hooking up engineering gigs, recommendations, and a lot of freedom regarding using the rooms in downtime.

[@?,*???&?]

I keep an intern around all the time when I work. No problem with that. These days, try telling a client they need to spend an extra $10 an hour to pay the assistant...it's not gonna happen. The kid in his basement doesn't have one (but then again, probably doesn't know why he'd need one anyway), but then again is using a DAW that has full recall ability- that used to be an option on an SSL! In the days of big, manual consoles, an assistant was more crucial. Tracking with 32 inputs was always a big set-up. With most people tracking with only 8 to 16 inputs these days, the size of the operation is much smaller. Documentation, if outboard, is relegated to pre-amp gain settings. Compression and eq may or may not be used on the way in. Therefore, next to nothing to write down.

Running for food is a consideration during a tracking session, but most sessions are in the 1 to 3 range for unsigned bands because that's all they can afford. Usually, the band can eat BEFORE or AFTER they record.

[dynomike]

Hmm... yeah, I guess there isn't as much use for a traditional assistant as before. Thanks for the replies (especially anthony); I'll keep thinking about it. I'm not much interested in working for free... too broke to commit much time to non-paying gigs.

[fossiltooth]

A couple years ago, I decided I should go the whole "becoming an assistant at a fancy-schmancy studio" route.

I had more or less taught myself working cheaply. I probably sent out nearly 100 resumes, getting about 32% "Um... do you want to intern instead?" 32% "Great resume, sorry, we don't have any additional paying positions right now. Please try again later" and 32% Non-repliers.

I landed a job at a big Neve VR room in Manhattan and stayed there for one year until they closed up shop and moved out-of-state. Seeing that my resume-to-paying-offer rate was about 1 or 2% BEFORE the economy tanked (this was around 2006), I doubt there'd be many more immediately paying options now.

If you are somehow able to intern, options open up much, much wider. Like I said, about 1-in-3 resumes I sent out got an immediate offer for uncompensated internships.

It's a funny business. I guess that's just what happens when supply wildly outstrips demand. Good luck! It's possible. I have quite a few friends who pay their rent assisting. Gigs are out there, they're just few and far between, especially at music-centric studios.

[mwerden]

I probably sent out nearly 100 resumes, getting about 32% "Um... do you want to intern instead?" 32% "Great resume, sorry, we don't have any additional paying positions right now. Please try again later" and 32% Non-repliers.

What about the other 4%?

Anyhow, I agree that the most realistic thing to do is find a good internship. I never did it, but I'd imagine that an internship at a "big studio" isn't worth a whole lot in terms of education these days. However, I'm sure there are plenty of good engineers out there who would be glad to have a savvy intern around. There's also the elusive paid internship, which is how I got my start.

On another note, I totally relate to your dilemma. I got the idea about a year ago to seek out an apprenticeship kind of situation and I've not been able to find a single opportunity. I'm of the opinion that learning from the best is the best way to learn, but in this day and age what do the best have to gain from having another person in the room taking up space?

[Anthony Caruso]

I guess there isn't as much use for a traditional assistant as before

Percentage wise, that's probably right. But certain studios will always need assistants. The road getting into the rooms can suck tho! I have a feeling they ARE mutually exclusive!

an internship at a "big studio" isn't worth a whole lot in terms of education these days

(replace internship with runner, toilet scrubber, front desk, whatever entry level position they offer)
I'm torn on this one, because at the time I'm thinking, "What the @#&^% am I learning from cleaning this place?". In hindsight I realized I learned a lot by observation regarding things like how the clients act and how certain clients expect to be treated a certain way and others are just cool, and how that difference changes the way others act around them; watching management and the flow of the studio regarding bookings, physical maintainance, and keeping clients coming back; the assistants can be a goldmine of information of all sorts; As far as cleaning, it would be 5am and I would be cleaning a room where there was a big mix happening and find myself spending way too much time checking out the patchbay and the gear they are using (without so much as BREATHING on that shit, of course!); stupid detail oriented stuff like making sure you get all 3 varieties of hot sauce at Taco Bell or checking the takeout order to make sure it's white rice not brown. You get a new appreciation for all of the details involved in the simplest of tasks, let alone the details involved when you are tracking a 28 piece string orchestra who are costing union wage. And like I said, it was my break. I was a runner one day and the next I was assisting, a luckier break than most but it all had to with the right place at the right time and how I had been writing with an engineer that worked at the studio a lot. We sold a song to this producer for a project, the assistant in the room had moved up to doing 99% of the engineering and they needed an assistant. My name came up. Bam. After my time, one runner there was listening to some of his own music on the front desk computer. Producer walks by, grabs a beat, now that runner lives in NY and produces full-time.

Contrary to how some like to frame it, the "big studio" is not a giant robotic fuck machine. The clients are people. They will get to know you, especially if you are friendly, helpful, forward thinking, and don't mess up the small stuff. You may find someone that you get along with and don't have a huge ego and they ask you to play guitar on a track. Who hears that track may be surprising. It may lead to you playing keys on Kanye West's remix of "Billie Jean".

I know some people are skeptical/bitter about this path but I only speak of what I know. I decided if I was going to do it I was going to do it at the biggest and most bad-ass place I could find that would offer minimum wage and the chance to BE INVOLVED. It worked out for me and I've had some pretty amazing opportunities come up that probably would not have if I hadn't stuck it out (and of course I missed out on other opportunities in that time, because that place was my entire existence for 3 1/2 years...but such is life, no?)

[rwc]

a big Neve VR room in Manhattan

Did it happen to have toothpicks jammed in all of the switches?

[@?,*???&?]

I had more or less taught myself working cheaply. I probably sent out nearly 100 resumes, getting about 32% "Um... do you want to intern instead?" 32% "Great resume, sorry, we don't have any additional paying positions right now. Please try again later" and 32% Non-repliers.

Yep, that sounds about right. That's about how many I sent out back in '91 in Los Angeles with about the same response looking for an assisting gig. My runner gig paid what runner gigs did, but with a huge amount of hours. When I moved up to assisting, it didn't pay a whole lot more, but the work was WAY better.

By the time you freelance as a first engineer, you work less, earn more, but earn about the same in the long run. Weird. These days, you earn even less though and two of the old jobs you could get have simply vanished in most circumstances.

[rwc]

By the time you freelance as a first engineer, you work less, earn more, but earn about the same in the long run. Weird. These days, you earn even less though and two of the old jobs you could get have simply vanished in most circumstances.

I used to work with some people who made about a dollar over minimum wage, who made $40k/yr as assistant engineers.

This was at a huge, well known studio.

Most of the freelance engineers I know, if you remove all other sources of income, don't rake in 40k/yr solely from their engineering work.

[joel hamilton]

I just hired an assistant from out of the country, and had to get a federal emplyer ID number, and now we are waiting for the department of bush'd gestappo nightmare police of the world to give us a visa and let us get on with life.

I had an assistant for a few years that started as an intern, and then I hired on as an assistant.

The position really is defined by the two of us, because it is assisting ME, not an assistant at the studio, so when I have a session at Timy Telephone in SF, my assistant is packing up the racks to fly with us, or hauling out the cases for the microphones he knows I am going to take, and then flying with me to the session and essentially is working with the house assistant during setup, and then possibly doing comps and edits on my laptop with LE in the lounge while we continue tracking...
That sort of thing.

[Sean Sullivan]

Sounds like a sweet gig for someone Joel.

[@?,*???&?]

By the time you freelance as a first engineer, you work less, earn more, but earn about the same in the long run. Weird. These days, you earn even less though and two of the old jobs you could get have simply vanished in most circumstances.

I used to work with some people who made about a dollar over minimum wage, who made $40k/yr as assistant engineers.

This was at a huge, well known studio.

Most of the freelance engineers I know, if you remove all other sources of income, don't rake in 40k/yr solely from their engineering work.

Yup. Wait until you see the Musician/Engineer Survey 2009 results, not shocking, but extremely enlightening...

[joel hamilton]

Sounds like a sweet gig for someone Joel.

Besides being stuck with me all the time, it sure seems like it is...