Working as a freelance audio engineer can be a very a satisfying and lucrative profession, but it’s not easy getting a start on your own. Here, I will share a few pieces of knowledge that have been key to my growth and success over the years. Hopefully, these tips will help you along in your career.

Practice Makes Perfect

You can go to school to learn the science of acoustics and audio engineering. You can have the best in the field teach you how they put together a mix and what gear they use on what applications and settings. You can seek out the best musicians in the world to produce music with. These things will definitely help you achieve a successful career, but none of these things will necessarily guarantee you will be able to deliver a good product. The only true way to develop the skills necessary for engineering is by spending as much time practicing recording and mixing as possible. A great way to practice is by inviting colleagues to collaborate with you on a project that you can record and mix. There are pre-recorded multitrack sessions you can find on various sites around the web that you can download and play around with. You can also produce some music of your own—even if it’s just to practice engineering it. Whatever you decide, you must record and mix as much as you possibly can if you want to get good at it.

Learn To Use Pro Tools

There are plenty of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) available that are great for production and post audio work. Ask a handful of engineers which program is the greatest and you will probably get widely different responses each for different reasons. The best program for you to use really takes figuring out the program that is best for your workflow. Nevertheless, it is crucial that you learn how to use Pro Tools even if it’s not your preferred DAW. Pro Tools is considered the industry standard in audio recording and editing software and the majority of professional studios around the globe will feature it as their program of choice. As a freelance engineer you will most likely have to spend time in other studios that use Pro Tools—and you do not want to end up in a situation where you have no idea how to use it. Like it or not, using Pro Tools is a necessary skill for any serious engineer to have in this age.

Always Provide A Good Pre-Mix

Whenever you send a rough draft of a song to someone, especially a potential client, make sure that the rough copy sounds really good. Don’t leave the mix untouched—this is an opportunity to show off your potential. Take time to make things sound loud and balanced by adding basic EQ and compression. Add some reverb and delay to the voices so they don’t sound dry, and always add tuning to a singers voice to give it a clean professional sound. I see a lot of engineers avoiding this practice perhaps because they are afraid of wasting time on something they aren’t getting paid to do, but this is a bad reason. In the end, you stand to gain a lot more than you will lose. Chances are if the pre-mix is really promising your clients will come back to you for a full mix and will spread the word to other people looking for a good engineer. But more importantly, if the rough mix doesn’t sound that great your client may feel like scrapping the entire project and going elsewhere to get it done.

It’s All About The Ear, Not The Gear

When I first got into audio engineering I was learning everything on my own. I had no studio access or mentor that I could go to learn the craft. All I had was an old laptop with less than 1GB of RAM and a demo of FL Studio. Despite this, I learned a lot about music production and mixing by tinkering around with what little I had. I learned how to make stock sounds more interesting by layering drums and messing around with distortion. I learned how to make a track sound decent with very little plugins and processing. I learned how to optimize space and memory and troubleshoot computer issues. Although the production quality wasn’t the highest in those days, I was definitely able to do a lot with little. Today I am in a much better situation and have made amazing upgrades to my setup, but looking back at my old work I am still impressed by how good the stuff sounded. Without all the fancy gear the music still had a great quality to it.

This turns out to be a very important skill to have as a freelance engineer because you will not always have the best possible resources at your disposal. Chances are you will not start out owning all the top of the line stuff you could ever want. You also cannot expect to be able to rent out the most lavish studios to work on every project you take. Sometimes you will have to settle on using a $100 mic rather than one that costs $10,000. Sometimes the studio you’re in may only have a basic recording setup with a few stock plug-ins for mixing. Sometimes you may be asked to spice up a song with a low-quality production behind it. Sometimes you may have a less than ideal acoustic space to record and mix in. A good engineer will be able to pull off any of these situations. If you need the gear to be good then you aren’t really a good engineer at all.