Stud­ies

In the courses of study "Ton­meister" and "Re­cord­ing Pro­du­cer | Ton­meister" we train stu­dents to be­come Ton­meister and Re­cord­ing Pro­du­cer.

The job de­scrip­tion of a Ton­meister

To­geth­er with the mu­si­cians, the Ton­meister is re­spons­ible for the res­ult and qual­ity of a mu­sic pro­duc­tion. This re­quires an artist­ic-tech­nic­al double qual­i­fic­a­tion. In their func­tion as re­cord­ing pro­du­cer they are re­spons­ible for the ex­e­cu­tion of the re­cord­ing and the com­mu­nic­a­tion between the re­cord­ing room and the sound con­trol room, and they are the artist­ic dir­ect­or of the re­cord­ing team. In their func­tion as Ton­meister at the mix­ing desk, they are the tech­nic­al dir­ect­or of the re­cord­ing team.

A mu­sic­al idea - at the time when Ton­meister is called in, usu­ally already real­ized in a mu­sic­al in­ter­pret­a­tion - as faith­ful as pos­sible to the score, and to pro­duce it as a re­cord­ing in the best pos­sible way in terms of per­form­ance prac­tice and artist­ic-aes­thet­ic qual­ity, to pro­cess it un­der artist­ic and tech­nic­al as­pects, and to pre­pare it for re­pro­duc­tion in com­mon re­pro­duc­tion formats, is the task of the Ton­meister. He sup­ports and ad­vises in­ter­pret­ers and, if ne­ces­sary, com­posers in their mu­sic­al cre­at­ive will by provid­ing feed­back and - if ne­ces­sary - in­flu­en­cing the mu­sic­al events be­fore the mi­cro­phones, and also by us­ing the tech­nic­al tools on the way from the mu­sic­al re­hears­al to the ac­tu­al re­cord­ing to the fin­ished sound me­di­um. In pop­u­lar mu­sic, the Ton­meister is of­ten also act­ive as a pro­du­cer and works closely with sup­port­ing sound en­gin­eers, tech­ni­cians and the artists in the team.

Gradu­ates of these Ton­meister courses are mainly pre­pared for the fol­low­ing areas of re­spons­ib­il­ity: On the one hand for the pro­fes­sion of an artist­ic re­cord­ing pro­du­cer, also known as a mu­sic dir­ect­or, and on the oth­er hand for the pro­fes­sion of a mix­ing en­gin­eer for mu­sic re­cord­ings (bal­ance en­gin­eer). In prin­ciple, both pro­fes­sions can be covered by a Det­mold gradu­ate, and each gradu­ate will find his or her fo­cus later in pro­fes­sion­al life. The fields of act­iv­ity in pop­u­lar mu­sic are also very di­verse: pro­du­cer, sound en­gin­eer, com­poser, sound de­sign­er, to name but a few fa­cets.

The range of ap­plic­a­tions in­cludes all form­a­tions, from solo to sym­phony or­ches­tra, from jazz duo to big band, from sing­er/song­writer to met­al band, from live re­cord­ing to the broad­cast of a cathed­ral con­cert or an op­era, from ste­reo re­cord­ing to a 120-track pro­duc­tion for wave field syn­thes­is, and styl­ist­ic­ally across all epochs of mu­sic his­tory to the present.

Ton­meister work in the fields of ra­dio, film and tele­vi­sion, and in private re­cord­ing stu­di­os. Gradu­ates of the Ton­meister course are in­creas­ingly open­ing up re­lated pro­fes­sion­al fields in the fields of sound re­in­force­ment (FOH), in theatres and op­era houses as well as in the de­vel­op­ment of au­dio tech­no­logy due to their high-qual­ity and multi-fa­ceted train­ing.

You can download the in­form­a­tion bro­chure of the Erich-Thi­en­haus-In­sti­tut (status 2014) as PDF file.