How Do You Hire an Audio Engineer?
Whether you own a music studio, TV station, movie studio, or any other business that involves recording sound, you’ll need an audio engineer to help develop professional audio products. Music production specialists will use different audio engineering programs and tools to generate high-quality sounds for your music or production.
Still, before you even think about how to hire the right audio engineers for your business, it’s important to learn what an audio engineer is, what they do, and why they’re important to your audio editing.
What Is Audio Engineering?
Also known as an ‘audio technician,’ an audio engineer is a technician who deals with acoustics for a broadcast or musical performance. An engineer handles design audio and post production mixing. Post production specialists also record audio products in studios where they’re required to balance and adjust sound sources with special tools like equalizers, dynamics processors, mixers, and audio effects.
Audio engineering involves scientific, artistic, and technical aspects of controlling, recording and duplicating audio products. An audio engineer applies electrical, digital, and audio principles to record and produce audio products like music, voiceovers, and other special sounds.
When hiring an audio engineer for mixing audio, ensure they’re proficient with all the standard audio engineering procedures. The quality of their music production depends on their mastery of these audio editing techniques and their mixing talent. Here are the most common audio engineering methods that every professional audio engineer must be familiar with:
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Duking: This technique allows the engineer to minimize the volume of one audio to make another audio more prominent. This technique is commonly used when merging a voice-over with background music.
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Mastering: This is the process of generating the final audio mix (the master) for distribution.
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Mix Bus Compression: The process of merging several elements of an audio mix through compression on the mix bus.
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EQ Matching: This process involves matching the tonal traits of two sources of sound.
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Sidechaining: This is the process of lowering one signal level in reaction to an extra signal.
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Reverb: This is an audio effect that replicates acoustic environments to generate reflections and reverberations for an illusion of space in the music recording.
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Compression: This technique helps the audio engineer to condense the dynamic range of a signal by depressing its loudest portions while increasing its quietest portions of the production.
Benefits of Hiring Audio Engineers
Producing high-quality audio mixes isn’t an easy feat for production specialists–it requires mastering all the principles of audio generation mentioned above, which is why you should work with qualified and experienced audio engineers. Here are some of the major benefits of hiring audio engineers for your audio editing and production needs:
Music Production Professionalism
The success of your project is pegged on the quality of your audio production. So, don’t gamble with your audio products by allowing inexperienced people to produce and mix your audio. You should leave this work to professional audio engineers who have undergone the necessary training and acquired extensive experience through years of practice. Engineering audio takes years of mastering, so it's best to hire someone with the necessary skills and talent.
High-quality audio engineering is an art that’s harnessed over many years of trial and error. Only a professional audio engineer who has been in the industry for several years can guarantee you excellent audio editing and production.
After multiple failures when editing audio and continuous training, professional audio engineers understand how to work with different audio production and mixing tools and programs to generate superior audio products. So, you can rest easy knowing that your audio production project is in professional hands.
Advanced Post Production Equipment
Your audio engineers know the best equipment to help you generate a high-quality audio production. They’ll advise you on the latest innovations and the most reliable brands. If you’re setting up a production studio or purchasing sound equipment for outdoor live events like music festivals, you’ll need advice from an experienced audio technician who understands what works and what doesn’t.
Alternatively, you can rent a professional studio for your audio production and mixing projects. If this sounds like a good plan for you, ask your audio engineers for recommendations of the best production studios in your area.
Objectivity
If you’re a musician or a voice-over artist, you should desist from recording music yourself. After all, your final products are likely to lack objectivity because you’ll end up getting lost in creativity–but a professional audio engineer can listen to your recordings objectively and give their unbiased opinion on the production.
Aside from helping your work to achieve the required neutrality, your audio engineer will also ensure that it attains the highest production quality. They’ll use their experience and skills to identify any errors that need to be rectified and fine-tuned before you generate a master.
Finding an Audio Engineer for Your Project
Finding the right audio engineer starts with a good job description uploaded to a trustworthy freelance market platform like Guru. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to hire a freelance audio engineer:
Determine Your Objectives
Before you can write a job description, you need to determine your goals for hiring for this role. Consider the responsibilities you’d like them to carry and the criteria you’re looking for in the perfect hire, including key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to achieve.
Write and Upload a Job Description
Once you know all the ins and outs of the job, you can write everything into a job description. Include a brief summary of the role, then list the specific responsibilities and requirements for the role. Try to be as specific as you can, as this will help potential candidates know what they’re getting into and determine if they’re qualified for the job.
After completing the job description, upload it to your hiring platform of choice. Guru is one of the best freelance marketplaces online, and it’s a great place to find reliable, experienced audio engineers for hire.
Field Potential Candidates
With your job description up, it’s time to field potential candidates. You can wait for interested leads to message you and offer their services, or you can search through job pages to pick out promising job seekers. Be sure to keep all your objectives in mind so that you can properly vet your choices.
Hire an Audio Engineer
Once you see someone you think is fit for the role, you can invite candidates to the next step of the hiring process, be it a short test or an interview, or you can just hire them right on the spot!
The best thing about Guru is that you can find your perfect freelancer in just a few clicks. Then, you can manage everything about the project right on the platform, from tasks to collaboration to payments, making hiring and managing as convenient as possible!
How to Hire Audio Engineers
As you already know, generating high-quality audio products isn’t a walk in the park. It’s a complex process that demands exceptional expertise and experience in audio engineering, so take your time to find the right audio engineers. Here are the main considerations you have to make when searching for audio engineers for your production:
Techniques Audio Engineers Are Proficient In
You need to hire audio engineers with the necessary skills and competence to handle complex audio production and mixing projects. Therefore, you have to check their proficiency and experience before hiring them. Consider the kind of audio engineering techniques they’re proficient in and how they apply them to different music projects.
Most audio engineers use a wide range of modern and traditional techniques and tools to produce and mix audio. While some traditional audio production tools are still relevant, your engineers shouldn’t solely rely on them to work on your production because they might not give you the quality of music you desire. Ensure that the audio technicians you hire are familiar with the latest audio production technologies because they improve the quality of your production.
Level of Training and Experience
It’s needless to say that your audio engineers should have all the necessary credentials showing their level of training. Choose music engineers who have attained the highest level of training because they’re production professionals.
Because this job can be challenging, you should check your engineers’ level of dedication and perseverance. They should have handled similar audio editing projects before to gain enough experience.
Communication and Interpersonal Skills
You’ll be interacting with your audio engineers every day as you inquire about the progress of your project. So, be sure to choose an engineer with good communication and interpersonal skills to avoid communication breakdown in the middle of an important project.
Fortunately, you can find highly qualified and experienced audio engineers for hire on Guru. Once your engineer is hired, you can move forward with your production.