SAE / Nashville

At a Glance
Name: SAE/Nashville Contact: Keith Sensing, director of Nashville Major Course of Study: Audio Engineer Degree Offered: Diploma program Accreditation: Tennessee Board of Higher Education Main Technology Platforms: SSL, Neve, and other analog and digital consoles; Pro Tools; other major technology systems Tuition: $13,800 per year for nine-month, 900-contact hour program Financial Assistance: Sallie Mae (SLM), school-based financing available.

SAE/Nashville was the second SAE school to open in the States in October 1999, only six months after its first school opened. Since then, the school has produced several hundred graduates who continue to make their marks throughout the music industry.
The SAE/Nashville facility is located in the heart of the city’s famed Music Row and is surrounded by an estimated 200 recording studios within a five-mile radius—arguably the densest studio population on Earth—and a market that has certainly availed itself of SAE’s graduates over the past two years. SAE students have worked in virtually every major Nashville-area studio as part of internship programs and as employees upon graduation.

The high degree of preparedness and acceptance of SAE graduates is understandable, as the technical and educational infrastructure at SAE/Nashville matches those found in most top-tier music recording and mixing facilities. The school’s 14,000-square-foot space houses 22 recording and mixing studios and digital audio labs, all equipped with technology widely used in major facilities here and elsewhere, including Neve and SSL analog consoles, Mackie digital mixers, Studer and Otari analog multitrack decks, and Digidesign Pro Tools hard disk recording and editing systems.

Keith Sensing, director

At SAE/Nashville, the emphasis is placed on large-scale tracking session techniques. Students learn the nuances of microphone choice and placement, acoustics, and the rhythm and flow patterns unique to this type of session. These same skills are readily translated to other large-scale music applications, including orchestral recording, film scoring and large-venue concert production.

“Nashville is unique in the world, in that it is the center of live music tracking sessions,” notes Mark Martin, SAE’s director of North American marketing and expansion. “We have adapted SAE’s core Audio Engineer curricula to take full advantage of what Nashville has to offer in this regard. The result is an audio engineering graduate who can handle even the most complex of large recording sessions, and who is comfortable in the studio with the greatest musicians in the world, which is another benefit of being in Nashville.”

SAE also offers another unique advantage: Students attending any SAE location are eligible to attend courses at any of the other 37 SAE schools in the world. This is a tremendous opportunity for students to become much more familiar with the increasingly global nature of the entertainment media industry. “You can start in Nashville and finish in Miami or Milan,” says Keith Sensing, SAE’s director of Nashville. “We want to bring our students more than a career—we want to bring them the world.”

SAE/Nashville hosts many guest lecturers from the top of their fields, such as Chuck Ainlay, who taught a seminar on surround mixing with an extended Q&A session and even hired an SAE student to intern at his studio. Not surprisingly, SAE/Nashville’s first graduating class (June 2000) is already making a mark on the industry. At the Hit Factory, graduate Kent Hertz has worked on projects with popular artists including Michael Jackson, Brandy, Missy Elliot and Julio Iglesias. News about other SAE/Nashville graduates: Brian Stoltzfus toured with Tanya Tucker as FOH engineer, Prince Corder became a member of the artist relations department at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and Michael Groneke is stage manager for Brooks and Dunn.

SAE/Nashville occupies Arista Records’ former facility on legendary Music Row. Literally hundreds of studios, management companies and record labels are located within five minutes of the campus. •