Hey guys. Just a question coming from a GarageBand amateur. I was wondering how some of you guys got into professional recording. Did you take music production as a course? paid for lessons? friends? self-taught? My journey's been a pretty slow one and my practice has come either from just trying things out or learning from the internet.

Well, I wouldnt say I've ever done any professional recording 
I've played an instrument since about 6 yrs old and started teaching myself other instruments from about 12. I remember in music lessons at school, the teacher would often record things and when I was about 16 he bought a new digital recorder and I was able to take the 8-track tape recorder home Since then it been a gradual increase of gear...
After about 2 years I switched to N-track (which was a free daw) and then about 2 years later I built a dedicated desktop and switched to cubase.

ive always taught myself evrything... home recording & playing guitar included ive never got on with authority figures including teachers which is probably why i never learnt much at school...so its always been trial & lots of error with me but that apeals to me i like an adventure yuo see
i bought a 4 track tape studio in the mid 80s & that was nice & simple to use & a good intro to home recording & then got a early version
   of ntrack which was quite basic then so it wasnt to hard to understand.....i dont think it was ever free tho?
i did have a lot of problems with it tho & after a big break to have my children i came back to it &  & joined the ntrack forum
i think a good user forum is essntial for any DAW
but the ntrack forum was a very strange place most of the people there were ex users & even tho theyd help you theyd say ntrack is total crap & unstable & doesnt work proprly go get reaper its much better while the few people there who still used ntrack would fight with them & tell them to f off......anyway one day i tried reaper & they were right my problems all disapeared...reaper is brilliant

Yeah, the first versions of n-track operated on a system similar to the first versions of reaper where the basic version was free and you paid for the pro version.

Forums aren't always a great place to learn things that work for you as they are just peoples opinions (IMO ). Best learning curve for me has been playing as much as possible, working with other peoples stuff, being in studios and making sure I know every piece of gear I get inside out. I've never taken a music production course and I doubt that many A-list producers/mixers have. They cost a hell of a lot of money. Money that (IMO!) is better spent getting yourself some gear and just heading out there!

my old ma & pa always sang when we were kids and my uncle bought a tape recorder,  i played a tennis racket at that time and it just took over from there, my flat today is like a warehouse, studio in the bedroom, the beds on top of a wardrobe !
thats how it starts and also what can happen so beware...
but i just love writing and recording, its my monkey.

 you sleep on top of a wardrobe?
you  cant mean your bed is perched on top of the wardrobe so if your on top of the wardrobe what do you keep in the bed?
i thought us recording in a tiny room full of wet washing& husbands gym equipment was pretty far out

well im not very tall so thats helps..its actually on stilts and since i built the ladder properly its been easier and considerably safer to climb into altho there have been times where ive exhausted myself attempting the climb and fallen asleep on the couch but generally its fine..
 

no no actually its a big old plan chest full of nonsense and artwork..
i put the mattress on top of it, quite neat actually...

Shame I'll never appreciate the tape recorder in this day and age. I guess you're right RamShackles, the best way to learn is just to keep working at it myself. For example I'm getting into EQs, listening to music I like and working out how they balance instruments and trying to replicate that in mine (which I'm still rubbish at )

My mum has offered to buy me a discounted "studio lesson" for Christmas, but I'm not sure if it's really going to help me at all (if anything it's going to put me off the stresses of doing it professionally with mounds of high tech equipment). I'm just developing it as a hobby. My problem at the moment that I've been lacking inspiration to write anything good down, which is bad because I want to constantly practise.

Here's the lesson I was on about.

12 years of drumming (live & recording), a diploma in Contemporary Popular Music, a BA in New Media Production Technology and years of research and experimentation!

Wish I had that much knowledge

I began with garageband and then i tried logic.

Then i've read, read, read, read again and i'm still reading recording tips on forums or sites...

I have no amazing skills but it's enough.

Seb.

Self taught all the way from overdubbing from one cassette player to another to Cubase, via various portastudios on the way.  While its great having all this powerful technology available now I don't envy people starting out, so many choices and so much to learn.  Anyway as said above forums are great (I'm a big fan of Sound on Sound), books and magazines, videos on youtube and (I'm afraid) manuals - its amaxing how much new stuff you can learn about a bit of software/ hardware you've been using for years just by reading the manual again...
P

Wow... Only just noticed this topic, doh!

For me I suppose it was just one of those flat tape deck recorders to start with, then an amp you could
buy out of your general catalogue which had a double tape deck on it lol
But the real learning happened when I was invited to be lead singer of a prog rock band. We used to record our
sessions with one of those big reel to reel jobbies  The bass player who later became the guitarist when I became bass player,
was really into the recording and tech side of it and I learned a few bit of mixing and recording from him.
Then at college, later on we used cubase on the old Atari st's, and that... given that I now use Ableton Live 8 and a computer to
record everything, was invaluabe.
If it's an option then music college has great advantages and things to offer. I learned to play my instrument about as well as I ever
will before I went to college and we musicians love to say we are self taught, but the other stuff you learn on top of that at college is
priceless.

Great topic!

Messing around with and thinking about it was the way I learnt.
Briefly, I picked up a guitar 13 years ago, got a 4 truck recorder 3 years after that, got a 16 truck one 2 years from then, and then 3 years later from that, I finally met DAW. DAW... It was like holly shhhh. It blew my mind.

I'm still learning every time I do something new with recording. Learning is a very fun process

Self taught, all through trial and error and some expensive mistakes, started with Cubase as midi only in conjuction with an 8 track reel to reel and all the sync problems that offered, upgraded to Cubase 5 through several stages. What did I really learn? Only one thing truly mattered and that is the spec of the hardware in my case PC. It took me some time to get my head around this, my solution was to jump ship to a desktop Mac running Pro Tools 10. Life in the world of DAW's is now simpler.