Joseph’s Journey from University Studies to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Beyond

Joseph Winters is currently finalising his final year with us at University Studies reading BA (Hons) Creative and Commercial Music. We had the pleasure of interviewing him about his time here and the incredible experiences he has had along the way.

How did you find your first publication with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, did you feel under pressure?

To be honest it really wasn’t a lot of pressure at all. The guy that I was working with who is the digital marketing manager there, he was really supportive and any questions about the concert or the music he was straight on it. It made for quite an easy writing process from my side of things. I gave him my first draft and a couple of days later it was all done.

As part of the degree, you have been off with front of house engineering for the Blue Eyed Soul Tour for Simply Red, tell us a bit about what that was like:

So, I turned up there, got my nice visitor badge on and everything with ‘Simply Red’ printed on it, I liked that, it was a nice little souvenir from it. So, I went and spoke to Davide (Lombardi, sound engineer and former student) and he talked me through all of their playback systems and the advantages that certain technology has over others. And how the tour has been for him and the whole live sound process. So, he talked me through how his system works which is made by Yamaha. Also, the guy who sets all the speakers up for the audience to hear back, he talked me through his challenges.

 What is the ambition long term?

I would like to be a mastering engineer, so that is the person that mixes the audio before it goes out to the audience. The mastering engineer is the person who is the final quality control checker, so they make sure that all the levels are right and it is suitable for the different platforms like CD’s, Vinyl, Spotify and so on. That is one thing that I would really be looking into doing. The thing with the music industry is you never just have one job, or very rarely. So, you would usually have two or three on the side and alongside that I am also looking into doing my music journalism as freelance. If I had an interesting or high-profile project that I was working on I could do the project itself and then also write an article about it for a magazine and get more money from that. Which is what it is all about at the end of the day.