Should You Go to Audio School? Here’s Your Answer.

Here are three reasons you should go to audio school and the number one reason why you shouldn’t.

I come across this question in online forums all the time.

• “Should I go to an audio school?”
• “Is it worth studying audio engineering or music production?”

People love to chime in with their opinions on this question.

Unfortunately, the people who answer usually haven’t gone to audio school. They can only give you one side of the argument at best because they’ve never gone. At worst, they don’t know what they’re talking about and spew nonsense about audio school because they want to justify to themselves that it isn’t a good idea.

They always say the same thing:

• “Don’t go! It’s a waste of money!”
• “There’s plenty of information online.”
• “You never have to leave your home because you can take online courses.”

Those are certainly reasons not to go, but it paints a lopsided picture because they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Going to audio school to study something that you’re genuinely passionate about has nothing to do with the efficiency of staying home.

That’s not the point of going to audio school.

Reason #1 – Go For the Experience

I was born and raised in Iceland in a little town called Hafnarfjörður. It’s the town of Vikings, Elves, and Rock music.

We tend to cram everything we want to be proud of into our identity as a hometown.

But like all small towns, there wasn’t much opportunity for me in audio.

So, at the height of the economic crash of 2008, I decided to go to the SAE Institute in Madrid, Spain, back in 2008.

And it changed my life.

Could I have learned everything they taught me in an online course?

Probably.

But that’s not the experience ultimately taught me.

The reason I chose Madrid, Spain was not purely for audio school purposes. I also wanted to learn Spanish.

I was really interested in languages after taking a lot of different language classes in high school. I particularly enjoyed Spanish so I used the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

(Or smush two flies with one swat, as we say in Iceland).

Combining my love of both audio and Spanish led me to Madrid.

Which brings me to an interesting tangent about the English word for stupidity.

Don’t Be Dumb

The English word stupid is derived from the Latin word “stupere,” which means “to be numb.

In Icelandic, the word stupid is “heimska.” It’s derived from the Old Norse word “Heimskr.” The root of that word is “Heim,” which means “home.”

So in my language, staying home and never experiencing the greater world out there, expanding your horizons, and seeing what else the world has to offer, means that you stay stupid.

When you change your environment, you change as a person.

You’ll grow. You’ll get out of your comfort zone. You’ll learn new skills. You’ll understand new things.

Ultimately becoming a better person.

So don’t discount expanding your horizons and actually looking at audio school as an experience to be had.

It’s not just about the stuff that you’ll learn in class.

Reason #2 – Go for the Accountability

Deadlines will help you become better at your craft.

Audio engineering is hard, and many people don’t simply have the self-discipline needed to improve at the rate that audio school will give you.

Taking an official course where you have to show up on time, take the classes, and be accountable for the grades and the homework will drastically improve your skills way more than any online course.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Higher education will also show you things you didn’t even know you needed to know.

Before I went to audio school, I had actually worked in the audio industry for a while, so I knew quite a bit about audio before I even enrolled in school because I had started a career already. But a complete college-level course gives you so much more than what you just learned in the niche you’re working in.

You’ll be introduced to things you didn’t even know you wanted to learn more about.

I was a live sound engineer first and foremost, so my expertise was in FOH mixing, setting up a stage, and running monitors. Basically advanced roadie stuff.

But when I went to audio school, the classes were so much more than that. Not only did I learn more about live sound, but more importantly, I learned about everything else.

• Studio recording
• Studio mixing
• Sound design
• Post-production
• Foley recording

I got introduced to all these different jobs I had even considered. These jobs I never would’ve thought to learn if I had just stayed at home and kept working in my live sound job.

Mechanical Frog and Foley

Two of my favorite projects were around sound design.

The first one was a silent video of this robotic frog jumping across the screen, and I had to create all the noises it should make to make it sound real.

Whirring noises from the robot hydraulics, background noise, some texture, etc. It taught me so much more about sound than I ever would’ve thought of exploring on my own.

Another homework assignment I did was foley for a commercial.

The video was completely stripped of its sound. It was a person walking into a big lobby of a skyscraper, going into an elevator, and going up.

Just imagine all the different sounds required for that particular scene!

• You need all the footsteps.
• You need those footsteps to have the reverb that matches that space.
• You need to have some background noise so that it doesn’t sound like it’s in a vacuum.

And then, once you get into the elevator, the reverb around the character changes, and you have to adapt to what’s happening on the screen.

I mention these projects because those were two projects that I still remember and loved having done.

And they taught me new things I didn’t even know I wanted to know more about.

So, don’t think you have it all figured out. You don’t know what you don’t know. Staying home means that you stay stagnant and stupid without any accountability to help you improve.

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