Pioneer urges women audio engineers to 'raise your hands' at every opportunity | Science & Technology - University of Rochester

During a recent master class, four-time Grammy Winner and Skywalker Sound director Leslie Ann Jones was impressed to find that nearly half of the University of Rochester students gathered were women by Bob Marcotte, Communications Officer, Science and Engineering.

Leslie Ann Jones, four-time Grammy Award winner and director of music recording and scoring at Skywalker Sound, teaches a master class to University of Rochester audio and music engineering students in the control room of a new recording studio in Gavett Hall. She says she was “pleasantly surprised by the great tools that the students have to work with”—particularly the analogue console. “Analogue is a great teaching tool because everything is in front of you,” Jones says. “You can see everything. You can put your hand on a knob and turn it and hear the difference, instead of putting your mouse on something. And then when you go to the same thing in digital, you’ll have a better idea of what it is you’re doing.”
Photo: University of Rochester/Bob Marcotte)

It is 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning and every seat is occupied in the control room of the new recording studio in Gavett Hall.

More than 30 audio and music engineering students at the University of Rochester have turned out for a master class by four-time Grammy Award winner Leslie Ann Jones, who 40 years ago began pioneering a place for women as audio engineers and producers in the recording industry.

Jones, the director of music recording and scoring at Skywalker Sound, is impressed that nearly half the students are women.

“Look at the number of women in this room,” she says. “That’s really astounding to me.”
Indeed, at the start of her career, Leslie Ann Jones was the only woman in a control room...

One of the mixes was a nicely rendered jazz piece written by another student featuring piano, saxophone, electric guitar, electric bass and drum kit. However, it had “so much compression everywhere that nothing breathes,” Jones said. “Even when you get to the loudest part of the sax solo, I don’t feel that ‘ah-ha’ moment of someone having achieved greatness over the last 24 bars.”

“I always have to get back to the composition,” she tells the students. “I always consider that my job as an engineer and mixer is to really serve what somebody wrote. And (in this case) I would feel that’s not what the composer intended.”
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Source: University of Rochester