BUILDING IMAGES IN SOUND
Mark Clem’s Pro Tools Classes
Mark Clem
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In his courses Introduction to Pro Tools and Intermediate Pro Tools, 911 Media Arts Center instructor Mark Clem brings close to 15 years of sound recording experience to helping workshop students understand the subtleties of this well-known industry standard audio mixing software.
“It’s not hard to learn the basics of how to use Pro Tools,” he says. “But it’s difficult to integrate the technical aspects into the art of mixing the audio, whether it’s the soundscape of a movie or the clean sounds you’d hear on a record.”
Clem says he started in 1993 doing sound for small independent films in Seattle. From there, he moved into scoring dance performances for Crispin Spaeth Dance Group and Alex Martin of Better Biscuit Dance. Before long he was recording his friends’ bands, and ultimately established his own recording studio, Soul Kitchen Studios in Shoreline.
A year ago, Clem also began working out of Shoreline’s renowned grunge-era studio, London Bridge, home to bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Mother Love Bone.
“It’s nice working with other people, because I find the mistakes I made when I was figuring all this stuff out are the same ones everyone else makes,” he says. “And the solutions I found are the same ones too.”
As a recording engineer, Clem is largely self-taught, an approach he doesn’t necessarily recommend to someone just starting out.
“The hardest part is at the beginning when you don’t know anything,” he says. “There’s the technical aspect, but there’s also an art and creativity to it. It takes a while to hear what you are doing, and how that affects the end product. It’s like any artistic endeavor—you don’t make great art until you’ve made some pretty bad stuff and learn from your mistakes.”
Clem says the idea of “building images and themes” in sound is central to his philosophy of mixing.
“I’m interested in how audio occupies space, and how you can build whatever you want within that space,” he says. “Your favorite records exist in a certain space. For some records in the studio, you can hear the room it was recorded in. Maybe on others it’s a bigger space, or an electronic space. If you have a conversation in a room versus a cathedral, there are expectations of what it should sound like and ways to subvert what you would normally expect.”
Among Clem’s own favorite records are those of Tom Waits, an artist who he says consistently subverts expectations by using non-standard sounds to convey an artistic vision, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in audio mixing. “Nowadays mixing is more complicated,” Clem says. “It has to sound good on an iPod, a stereo, a film.”
“A music producer who works with an artist has to have a good idea of what he’s looking for from the start of the project,” he adds. “Not being aware of the goal makes it easy to make bad choices in the recording stage that are difficult to fix in the mix stage.”