Id built up my client base at studios like Classic Sound and Trutone Mastering Labs in Manhattan, but the music scene there has gotten dramatically smaller and more expensive over the years, Joe explains. I really wanted to have my own place, where Im able to give clients world-class attention without raising the costs or cutting corners in any way.

After two months of construction, Joe Lambert Mastering Studios opened its doors in Brooklyn in August and has seen a good amount of traffic since. It was a daunting task to get things up and running, for sure. This place was just a shell and now its a beautiful room it took a lot of money and it caused a lot of stress, but I knew that I had the work, Joe continues. I also knew that all of the musicians had moved to Brooklyn, and that this is where the music scene of New York City is now. It made more sense for me to be here my clients love it, and Im very happy to be here, too.

The final step in audio post-production, the mastering process is an art form in and of itself, aided in no small part by the combination of Joes collection of analog and digital gear and his experienced ears. And while todays technological resources allow Joe to operate remotely with clients all over the world, hes still a big fan of working directly with the artist.

Some engineers I know seem to do 80 percent of their work unattended, but I prefer to have clients here with me because Im comfortable working with people, he notes. It can be bands, a producer, an engineer, or all of the above. Theres no better way to find out things about the project and its also fun to meet the people. That is why you get into working in this stuff in the first place its supposed to be fun.

Since relocating, Joes been busy, working on the forthcoming Animal Collective album and a Red Hot label compilation featuring the likes of Cat Power, Arcade Fire, and The National.

Certain engineers get comfortable in just one genre and seem to stick with it, he says. I just like to work on good music. Working in the city, I was exposed to a lot of good hip -hop and rap, and Ive played in bands all my life so I know a lot of people in the world of rock. And I was also exposed to a lot of great jazz and classical artists when I worked at Classic Sound.

Ive always felt fortunate to work with a lot of different types of artists. To me, the genre doesnt matter if I just do what I want, which is really listen to the music and react and try not to give it a specific sound, Im good, he explains. Im never trying to put my stamp on it. This is ultimately a service industry, and our job is to make people sound better and make their product sound magical. You need a certain sense of humility when your job is to make others sound good, because its not about yourself. If you do that well, youll succeed and get your credit where its due.

Based in Kansas City, Missouri, a large bulk of Jons work revolves around covering Midwest teams such as Major League Baseball team the Kansas City Royals, the National Football Leagues Kansas City Chiefs, and college football team the Kansas Jayhawks.

I played basketball in high school and have always been a big sports fan, Jon says. When I went to Full Sail, I had every intention of working in film, and that was what I started doing after I graduated. But I landed a gig in sports and kind of found a niche. I learned that theres a lot of work in sports television production, anywhere around the nation.

Whats cool about what I do is that once youve built a reputation and have a rapport with certain companies like CNN, FOX, and ESPN, theyll travel you around the country to cover sporting events, he continues. I covered a baseball tournament in Las Vegas last summer that was great. Most people go to Vegas and lose money, but when you get to go there, get paid handsomely for it, and still get to have a good time, thats a pretty nice deal.

Still, itd be a mistake to dismiss covering games aswell, all fun and games. A lot of people dont realize how much time we spend out there covering a game, Jon points out. If its a Royals baseball game and the first pitch is at 7:00pm, we have to be there at 1:00pm to start setting up cameras and do a lot of preproduction, tweaking little elements of what happens during the broadcast. During that time were also trying to get interviews with the players or head coaches before the game starts. And then afterwards, it generally takes us an hour to an hour and a half to break our equipment down and get it packed back into the production truck. For an average day, well be out there for about ten hours. Ive even worked a Steelers game in St. Louis where we were there for 18 hours.

It can be very stressful. Theres a big difference between covering a live event and working on something like a commercial or a film, he adds. Sure, on a film the director and producers dont want shots to get messed up, but you do at least have five chances to get it right. But if you screw up running a camera during a game, youre going to hear quite a bit about it afterwards, and that can and has affected people getting hired on for later shows.

But despite the pressure of working in a live environment, the reality of Jons situation is that he does get paid to cover and watch sports games. Theres kind of a joke among those who work in live sports that this is living the dream. I mean, you do see so many sporting events that it can get boring, but every once in a while youll see a game thats just amazing, he says. I worked the Big 12 basketball tournament last year for ESPN. The game between Kansas and Texas was one of the best games Ive ever seen. And to be there live, on the court, getting paid for it makes it all worth it.

The production company specializes in hip-hop, contemporary R&B, and pop music, and has gotten involved with some major projects, including a licensing deal with the BET-J network and the forthcoming single Tangerine off the upcoming solo album from Big Boi of Outkast.

Respectable Societys genesis began while all three students were enrolled in the Recording Arts degree program at Full Sail. We definitely didnt have a concrete plan at that point, recalls Chris Franklin. We had the idea to collaborate in the future, but we thought it would be between separate companies. But when we realized that we were three people going in the same direction with a common goal, it only made sense to try the team thing out and its been working.

While all three of Respectable Societys co-owners are producers in their own right, each member uses their individual strengths to play a different role in the companys direction. Im definitely the guy who everyone sees first, Terrence admits from outside Outkasts Stankonia studios, where he also works as an in-house engineer. Im the face of the group, and thats how Chris and Chris both wanted it to be. But theyre great and talented individuals, too. On our own, we could all be great producers, but its together that were really able to make moves.

[[inline1 left]]One of the first big moves for the trio came during a studio session at Stankonia when Terrence was able to slide a CD of his beats to Big Boi. I knew what he liked, and I already had developed a relationship with him from working there, the gregarious musician describes. Now his track is slated to sit beside contributions from more established producers like Scott Storch and Organized Noize. I made it onto the album based purely off [the merit of my] music, but I was able to observe that its bigger than just one person. Scott Storch has a publicist, a manager, and a team of people behind him. So I knew that if I had a team behind me, the potential could be even greater.

Terrences internship at Stankonia really laid the groundwork for the connections that weve made and where were at now, adds Chris Barron, who stayed at Full Sail after getting his Recording Arts degree to continue in the Entertainment Business Bachelors Degree Program. I really enjoyed my business and entertainment law classes, so Ive taken on something of an administrative angle at Respectable Society registering the businesses, making calls, going over contracts. Thats really one of my strengths.

While the goal is for all three co-owners to eventually be able to dedicate their time strictly to music, the overall experience theyve gained working in multiple facets of the business has proved to be a rewarding endeavor. With plans to expand with film, digital media, and even a clothing line, its evident that the Respectable Society machine isnt showing signs of slowing down anytime soon.

Every day is really different, and thats what I love about doing this work, Barron says. There are always different ways to add avenues of revenue for the company. Placing music with major artists is the idea, but there are plenty of other ways to make money in the meantime.

New Creature is a graphic design studio that specializes in advertising and marketing solutions at the corporate level, and Craigs role as Structural Designer has him using his Full Sail education to create product displays for major retail chains across the country. At age 24 and coming up on his first year at the company, Craig has been busy creating promotional material for such clients as Wal-Mart, Electronic Arts, Marvel, and Hasbro.

Companies will come to us with a request for a kiosk or a display, and Ill take the 3D work and design it based on the request, he explains. So I use a lot of stuff I learned at Full Sail and apply that to the marketing side of things. We also do a lot of research as designers, and sometimes well go to a local store and just watch people and see how they go from one product to another. Its interesting to learn why people are led to buy something.

As part of the marketing team, Craig gets advance access to a number of major product licenses. Most recently hes been working with the toy lines for the upcoming 2009 summer films Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Weve been working on their merchandise for a while, [so we] get to see all the inside stuff, he explains. People from Hasbro come by and show us movie clips, and all the stuff thats going to be coming out, like toys and videogames. Its awesome, and when I tell my friends about it theyre like Wow, I need a job like you have.

New Creature recently wrapped up their busiest stretch of the year, prepping for the holiday shopping season. This saw the team cranking out dozens of designs for companies clamoring to grab shoppers’ attention not the easiest job when you consider the abuse these displays go through during the season’s retail rush.

Black Friday this year was insane, Craig explains. We had so much work to do to get all of our displays in the stores on time and then people just ravaged them on that day. So now we have to think of an even better way to build them for next year.

And thats when the job can get pretty technical because you have to figure out a strategic way to build them so they will hold up to the weight while fitting so many of a product all while trying to make it look cool. And to me the most gratifying part is when you actually see something that came out of your hard work in a physical form. Its just awesome.

Settling down after the holiday rush, Craig has had a chance to look back on his time at New Creature, and feels fortunate to have been able to take his Full Sail education to a company that has such a creative approach to advertising solutions.

This has been the companys best year ever in terms of bringing in revenue, and it keeps growing fast, he shares. Were becoming one of the biggest studios in the area for this kind of work. I also feel like Im really successful in my career now. Ive already bought my first house, and thats a pretty awesome feeling. I couldnt have done it without New Creature, or without Full Sail for sure.

As employees of Cleveland-based Eighth Day Sound, Stephen and Jim have both lent their audio skills to a variety of touring acts across the globe. Stephen, System Engineer and Crew Chief for the tour, oversees the bulk of the audio gear thats used for the show each night.

Im there in the morning, emptying out the truck at 8:30 or 9:00, and making sure that all of the gear is up and running before show time, says the Recording Arts 00 grad. Shortly after graduating from Full Sail, Stephen began freelancing at Eighth Day and was eventually hired full-time and given the chance to tour with a diverse line-up of artists in a variety of positions. I did monitors for 311 for about five years. I recently was doing front of house for Gnarls Barkley, as well as monitors for Tool. At this point, I periodically do work for Whitney Houston, and when Im not mixing, Im Crew Chief on whatever tour Im on.

In contrast to Stephens extensive resume, Jim has just started his career. Im pretty fresh, the Show Production & Touring 07 grad laughs. Even so, his position as PA tech at Eighth Day has paired him with some huge touring acts. Two months after I started with Eighth Day, they sent me out with the Foo Fighters for my first tour. I also worked on a Cyndi Lauper tour, and did work with Switchfoot, Jars of Clay, and Robert Randolph. For a first year, its been really busy, which is very cool for me.

The Coldplay tour has found the grads working as part of a 60-person crew, putting on a show thats epic in its scale. Its like nothing Ive ever seen before, Jim enthuses. All of the people that we work with are really cool, and Coldplay really knows how to work the crowd. Its quite a production, much more than what Ive been used to; the whole performance really builds throughout the show and the experience is much more visual than what Ive done before.

Theres a tremendous amount of video and lights, Stephen confirms. Its a huge challenge for us as audio guys to be working with so many other people. Weve got to work around a lot of other departments to get our stuff out. The rig is huge, and its just really a lot of gear, so it takes a lot of preparation to make sure that everythings going to work properly every day.

Four songs into the set, the band plays one of their big singles, In My Place, and they turn on all the lights in the arena, he continues. Everyone in the building is on their feet, yelling as loud as they can, he continues. Its those moments that just make you think, Cool! This is why I do this.

While both grads admit that life on the road can be demanding, with 14-hour work days and so much time spent away from friends and family, they are also quick to point out that their careers have taken them to places theyd never dreamt of going to before.

Its like being a paid tourist, Jim smiles. I was in D.C. the other day on an off-day, and I was exploring the sights and being the ultimate tourist, just thinking, I cant believe Im getting paid for this.

Ive traveled all over the world, Stephen adds. This past year alone, Ive gone to Morocco and Kazakhstan I dont know anyone else who can say that theyve done that!

But there are no rows of seats or spectators, only several dozen casually clad college students who look like a typical rock-show road crew.

They hover around a huge stage, rigging banks of lights overhead and raising a thousand pounds’ worth of speakers into the air on motorized chains.

Instructors watch every move. In a few hours, the students will be graded on how well they have learned to produce a major rock ‘n’ roll show, even though the featured acts are local bands serving as class guinea pigs.

Across University Boulevard, in a sprawling complex of modern glass buildings, another class is in session. Students sit at a million-dollar mixing console, scrutinizing a scene from Shrek on a large flat-screen monitor.

The assignment: remove a six-minute chunk of dialogue and sound effects from a cacophonous action scene, then replace it with their own audio track. For a good grade, the group’s material must match the sequence as seamlessly as if it had been mixed in Hollywood.

At an adjacent shopping center, a space big enough to hold a department store has been transformed into an indoor movie soundstage. A film and video production class is in progress, with a cluster of teens and 20-somethings shooting a scene on an elaborate set they designed and built.

Down a long hallway, a handful of students puts finishing touches on small monster action figures sculpted from modeling clay. The cartoonish creations will eventually be replicated on screens as part of a computer animation class.

Meanwhile, laptop screens in other classrooms have been flashing with video games, all conceptualized and built by majors in game design.

It seems too cool for school. But this is business as usual at Full Sail Real World Education, a two-year college built around the entertainment industry.

The campus is fittingly in the shadow of Orlando’s entertainment world. But in the education world, Full Sail is at the intersection of traditional college and the MTV generation.

It has a student body weaned on pop culture: music videos, rock concerts, computer games and the ’90s boom of cable TV and movies.

And it is a school where a B.S. is, well, B.S.

“The entertainment industry doesn’t respect degrees. It doesn’t matter if you have an associate of arts, a bachelor’s or a master’s,” says Full Sail president Garry Jones, the first employee hired in 1979 by school founder John Phelps.

“On day one, when you walk onto the set of a motion picture, when you walk into a studio where an album is being recorded, what the director or engineer wants to know is this: Can you fulfill the task that I need done?

“And that’s where we come in.”

* * *

Full Sail derives its name from a simple metaphor.

It wants students who long to work in the entertainment business. If they arrive with their “sails” up, marketing director Andrew Solberg says, “we’ll give you the wind and energy and power to propel you at optimum speed.”

That translates into teachers who have worked in the business and train students on current industry equipment, such as Pro Tools music production workstations, Avid digital editing machines and the same 144-channel mixing boards found in Los Angeles and New York recording studios. There’s also a 30-person placement department to help graduates land jobs.

You don’t go to Full Sail if you want to be the next Avril Lavigne or Justin Timberlake. You go so you can learn to work the soundboard for them at a concert or in the studio.

Walls in Full Sail’s recording arts building are lined with gold and platinum records that its graduates have worked on as engineers: for Stevie Wonder, Creed, Robert Palmer, Joan Osborne and many others. Two have won Grammys.

Full Sail alumni have gone on to work in support positions in other entertainment fields as well, including technical director at George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic studio, stage manager for magician David Copperfield and interface programmer for the Madden NFL and NASCAR 2003 video games.

Full Sail isn’t the only entertainment school around. But it is well-known in the industry.

“Everybody who comes out of Full Sail has a good foundation to step into studio work,” says Kevin Dillon, who runs Gloria Estefan’s Crescent Moon Studios in Miami.

Dillon employs a half-dozen Full Sail graduates as assistant engineers. “I’ve found that people from Full Sail have made the commitment to a career path. They’re very focused, and you need to be to succeed in this industry,” he says.

“The Full Sail students we get are ready for an internship. They come prepared and have learned enough to start a career in TV and film,” says Constantin Preda, production coordinator of Nickelodeon’s Slimetime Live. “The students are trained on cutting-edge equipment, so they’re technically oriented, and that’s a great starting point. But they’ve also done things like make short 35-millimeter films, so they can work on directing and script supervision.”

Preda likes the passion he has seen from Full Sail students:

“They have a strong desire to learn from real experience, which the school seems to promote.”

* * *

It began in 1979 as a recording studio workshop for a handful of aspiring musicians. It added film a few years later and four more programs in 1998-99.

Today, Full Sail has an enrollment of 4,100 and offers six associate of arts degrees, for recording arts, game design, film and video, digital media, show production and touring, and computer animation.

The school has an open-enrollment policy, and new students start each month. Good grades in high school or college are not a prerequisite for admission. But school officials say they stress up front that making it through Full Sail’s 12- to 14-month programs takes a big commitment.

“Every industry we teach is a 24-hour-a-day industry,” Solberg says. “There are no bankers hours in a film or music studio. You may have a 1 a.m. lab. But that’s a real-world application.”

Tuition is not cheap. The degree programs range from $29,875 to $33,775. But Full Sail administrators and past and present students say it sends graduates into the job market well ahead of four-year college students.

As evidence, the school points to its placement rates in the entertainment industry. From the fall of 2000 to the summer of 2001, the rates ranged from 76 percent to 84 percent in the six programs, according to statistics submitted to the Florida Department of Education Commission for Independent Education, which licenses Full Sail.

“There’s a trend in our country toward private, focused education that trains people for a specific career,” Jones says. “I think there will always be students who, like I was, didn’t quite know in their freshman year in college what in the world they wanted to become or wanted to study. But the good news is, that for the hundreds of thousands of students who do know, there are vehicles for them.

“We cater to students who knew it from the first time they saw Star Wars: Episode I, or the first time they saw VH1’s Behind the Music, and went, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s what I have to do with my life.’ Those are the students who do really well here.”

* * *

Not every educator agrees.

Martin Snyder of the American Association of University Professors sees a trend toward providing “what is essentially vocational training rather than education.” And that concerns him.

“I believe the old notion, and the correct notion, of education is that it provides a foundation for life, not just for making a living,” says Snyder, director of planning and development at the Washington, D.C., organization.

“So I would see (a college such as Full Sail) as a very limited kind of training program. And these kinds of programs, if they’re well done, they typically have a high degree of placement. But the question is, where do people go after that?”

Snyder wonders whether individuals trained to run mixing boards or operate a movie camera will find themselves in the same position years later.

“The problem is that it educates you for something that’s very relevant right now but may not be there in the future,” he says. “And what happens if the technology changes radically? Do they have the flexibility to change with it? Are they broadly enough educated to grow into larger dimensions of the job and move ahead with their lives?”

Snyder, who taught Latin and Greek for 20 years at Duquesne University, also sees another issue:

“The big question is this: Is a college education meant as something to get you a job, or is it meant to enhance your life? In the long run, we think it’s there to enhance your life and make you a better person, not necessarily a more skilled technician.”

But Full Sail administrators say they enhance their students’ lives by helping them pursue their dreams.

Mike Oster, a 1991 recording arts graduate, says that many Full Sail students have also attended four-year colleges. He got his B.A. at the University of South Florida in Tampa in criminology. But rather than pursue a law career, he wanted to run a recording studio. Full Sail became his version of graduate school.

Oster credits the school with providing the training that gained him entry into the industry and the knowledge to adapt to constantly changing technology. In addition, he says, the soundboard skills he developed allowed him to work successfully as a freelancer in film and television.

“Whether you go there right out of high school or after college, you receive the same strong foundation,” says Oster, who has operated a national CD editing and mastering studio, F7 Sound and Vision in Tampa, for 10 years.

“I’ve been building upon it since I left there. Yes, the equipment has changed a lot in a decade. But I’ve been able to grow with it, because the principles of recording that I learned at Full Sail are still the same, no matter if it’s new equipment or old. It’s up to each individual to keep learning, and that’s true if you’re a doctor, a lawyer or a sound tech.”

To help the process, the school offers permanent class-auditing privileges to graduates if they need to master new technology or fields later in their careers. Full Sail also offers lifetime use of its placement department in case graduates wish to find other jobs down the road.

“All through their first year, we start educating them about each field and narrowing down their options,” says Jay Noble, a 1987 Full Sail graduate who works as an adviser in the placement department. “And if they don’t have enough money to live in Los Angeles, for instance, we’ll recommend alternative areas that we know are beneficial to their careers.”

Linda Thornton is the industry outreach manager whose office maintains a data base of contacts and job openings around the country. Thorton clicks a mouse and calls up job updates and contacts from Allied Artists, Merv Griffin Productions, America’s Most Wanted and more.

“I’ve been here seven years, and at first, the industry didn’t know much about us. They had no idea of the magnitude of what we do,” she says. “Are you in a swamp? A barn? But once they found out what we do and saw how well our graduates have performed, we’ve gotten great feedback. We know what we teach is right on the money.”

* * *

Aesthetically, Full Sail has been designed to mirror a major studio. But its emphasis is hands-on instruction from pros and hundreds of guest lecturers.

The lecturer include recognizable names such as guitarist Larry Carlton and singer Melissa Etheridge. But most are known for the artists they’ve worked with as producers or engineers, artists such as Shania Twain, the Dave Matthews Band, Aerosmith and Tom Petty.

Christopher Evans, 18, heard about Full Sail on the Internet. He took the school’s monthly “Behind the Scenes Tour” with his parents last summer and was sold. “I’m already working on an animation of a forest,” the Daytona Beach resident says.

Others tried college before stumbling upon Full Sail. Nikisha Franco, 25, received an engineering degree from Southern Polytechnic State in Georgia. But she longed to learn filmmaking.

Now she’s in her second month. “I just go to the soundstages and volunteer when I’m not in class,” she says. “I’ve been learning by doing.”

Missouri native Kirk Williams, 24, got a B.A. and a master’s in computer science, but he was laid off last year from Lucent Technologies. So he decided to pursue his dream of making video games and found Full Sail. “When I’m done, I’ll actually have my own video game that I’ve created. That’ll be my resume, not a piece of paper,” he says.

Graduates don’t always walk into big jobs or high-paying salaries, the school says. Rising in the industry can take time, as with Greg Vermette.

Vermette, 33, graduated from the University of Massachusetts with an audio-engineering degree in 1987. He worked as a sound engineer, but after hearing about Full Sail from several alumni, he enrolled. “They were way ahead of where I had been in technical knowledge,” he says. “I was going nowhere.”

At Full Sail, Vermette shifted focus to film and digital media, and then changed careers. He paid his dues in a TV studio in Charlotte, N.C. Today, he is a graphics editor in Philadelphia doing post-production for network TV commercials.

“Full Sail graduates thousands of people, and not everyone is successful on the other side,” he says. “Some people don’t have the right attitude going in. They think they’ll get out and immediately be working for George Lucas on Star Wars.”

But there’s a reward for patience and the hefty tuition that still has him paying off student loans.

“For those people who are willing to work their way up, you can still find a lot of success,” he says. “I’m taking the lower-profile road, but I’m making fairly good money. I have a house and support my family. And have a career I love.”