William Absent
To be honest, I am completely new to audio. Unlike many of my peers, I haven’t been playing with sound or video since I emerged from the womb. I didn’t really decide that I wanted work with music until I was a junior in high school and I didn’t become an audio production major until my second year of college. Thankfully, I have an amazing mentor who I look up to as a source of great knowledge and inspiration. When I was younger, we first met when he offered to give me lessons playing bass guitar. Now, he is currently offering my first internship at his studio and is breaking me into the audio world and bringing me up to speed. I owe a lot to William Absent at Shrinelabs Studios for taking me under his wing.
William is the type of audiophile I wish I could be. He’s been making music and tinkering with sound equipment since he was a kid. His has all kinds of guitars, basses, organs, microphones, amps, preamps, speakers, interfaces, and every kind of gadget and gizmo you could imagine and I couldn’t even begin to describe. He knows how every one of them works, how it was made, the history of the manufacturer, how to maintain it. He is able to offer judgment on the quality of the different types of equipment he owns through objective analysis of how they were made and the materials used as well as a subjective description of why he prefers one manufacturer from a specific period in time verses another. I know this is probably normal for people who own and run studios but it’s still amazing to me. Here's a sample of his music:
Alexi Laiho
As someone who is so new to the field, who currently has negligible experience, and who really has no idea what the heck they’re doing, I can’t really say that I have a firm enough grounding to really have created much of my own sound. I don’t really know enough of the vocabulary to be able to dissect and analyze sound. However, with what little I do know I can say that Alexi Laiho’s compositions in his heavy metal band, Chidlren of Bodom blow my mind. Laiho is most commonly known for his incredible talent on guitar, however, I love his music not just for his amazing solos, I’m more interested in how the riffs work together with all the other elements of the song: the drum beat, the bassline, the keyboards, and the two guitars. Each element of most of his songs has its own unique color that stands out in the song while contributing to the song as a whole. The combination of different sounds collide together to in a sonic assault that creates subconscious tension that is intended to get the listener to move and release the tension through physical movement without thinking. The songs make you want to jump up and headbang without actually saying “hey, you should give yourself whiplash… just for funsies”. In many of his songs, the tension builds towards the climax, the guitar solo, and then it releases after the solo as the song winds down or comes to a semi-abrupt stop. A perfect example of this would be in the song Tie My Rope, off of Children of Bodom’s most recent album, Blooddrunk.
Tim Burton
Someone who inspires me, not as an audio producer, but as an artist in general, in terms of content, theme, and style, would be Tim Burton. Much of his work deals with existence outside of social norms, death, the supernatural and just overall dark themes. He often likes to juxtapose horror-esque settings and couple them with childlike character qualities such as in the film Nightmare Before Christmas where he sets the story in a town where every day is Halloween and fear lurks around every corner and then he contrasts the setting by exposing the main character, Jack Skellington, to Christmas for the first time where he is filled with wonder and dreams of bringing Christmas back to Halloweentown. This contrast gives the film an edgy and exciting feel that I love about a lot of Burton’s other works. For me, the combination of happy and creepy is like the combination of sweet and salty that makes chocolate covered pretzel’s so delicious.
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