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Issue #156 – Student Successes
by L. Swift and Jeff McQ
When you’re learning on the job in a real recording studio, you never know when it will happen: the chance to work with a major band or artist. For Recording Connection student Brandyn Zellmer, who apprentices in Des Moines, Iowa, it came in the middle of a family event.
“I was at my cousin’s wedding,” he explains. “Jon, my current mentor, texted me and asked me if I would like to potentially set up for a famous band. I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’”
It turned out the band was Lady Antebellum, who were in town on a tour stop at the Iowa State Fair. The call was to do last-minute vocals for the soundtrack of an upcoming remake of Dirty Dancing.
“They flew out a producer, his name’s Alex,” says Brandyn. “And so I set up the mics and ran the patch bay and stuff and got to meet everybody…They did a three-part harmony for it, and so that was really neat to watch them in action and seeing one by one and how everything kind of fell together.”
A lifetime musician, Brandyn says his interest in recording began as a teenager when his rock band went into the studio to record a demo. “I just thought it was awesome how everything was captured,” he says, “and just the whole fundamentals of the recording process.”
However, after starting on a music major at a local community college, Brandyn soon realized he needed more than he was getting as far as technical knowledge was concerned. “After the first year, I kind of realized that it was going to be about two years of general education, and that’s not exactly what I was looking for,” he says. “I was looking for more of a live production kind of thing or even studio production. So then I started looking into…recording schools and my mom was actually the one who stumbled across the Recording Connection.”
Recording mentor Jon Locker
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