A Grammy-award winning alumni of Binghamton High School returned to his old stomping grounds to educate and inspire the next generation of musicians.
Dr. Stephen Roessner (BHS Class of 2000) stopped by the Black Box Theatre at Binghamton High School to speak to Music Production and Theatre students on February 12 to provide insight from his career as recording artist, producer, and audio engineer.
At one point he gave an example of how, when working with one band on a recording, the band wanted the vocals on one of the tracks to sound exhausted, but the singer simply trying to sound exhausted was not working. Dr. Roessner instructed the vocalist to run three laps around the studio, come back in, and then record the track. This commitment to creative approaches and not obsessing over perfection is one he credits as taking him far in his career.
“I want to capture the artists in their most genuine form,” Dr. Roessner noted. “ What I’m looking for is the emotion.”
After a high school career that featured much time in the band room learning from Mr. Smales and helping with sound and lighting at the Helen Foley Theatre, Dr. Roessner attended SUNY Fredonia where he majored in music and recording technology. He then became a recording musician after college for eight years. Between two bands, Dr. Roessner performed more than 500 live shows in the United States and around the world. When his time as a traveling musician ended, he moved to New York City for several years where he interned at Gramercy Post and then worked at MTV.
Dr. Roessner left his job at MTV to pursue another position that played more into his passions: as a recording engineer at the well-known Julliard School. While at Julliard, Dr. Roessner helped record albums with many artists. One of those albums Dr. Roessner engineered and mixed was Messiaen: Livre Du Saint-Sacrement by Paul Jacobs, which won a Grammy Award in 2011 for Instrumental Soloist Performance.
He eventually moved on to receiving his Master’s Degree and PhD from the University of Rochester, where he is today. Since becoming faculty there, he has helped build a brand-new audio program – Audio and Music Engineering. He also hosts/runs two podcasts (Today Then and Hear UR) and owns a freelance audio engineering/producing company called Calibrated Sound. He also co-owns Records Of Choice, a record label focused on Rochester-based bands.
His overall advice to students who were interested in becoming a recording artist like the ones he works with on a day-to-day basis was to get comfortable putting out a piece of music even if it is not 100% perfect, and then move on to the next.
“If you feel the music is done, put it out there, because you’re then going to work on the next song. You’re going to move on. That’s your record of that song. You’ll get better with each one,” Dr. Roessner added. “If you get stuck working on the same song, mixing it and remixing it, and you just get infatuated with it, that’s not good. You need to get better at your art, and the best way to do that is know you can move on.”
