Introduction Blog

Hello everyone, my name is Kyle Ballard. I am a recording engineer from Longmont, Colorado going to school at Full Sail University for my degree in Recording Arts. My humble beginnings started at a church back home. I learned how to run live sound for my youth group in my sophomore year of high school. I spent hours and hours teaching myself how everything worked through trial and error with help from some other audio people. Running live sound came very natural to me. Eventually I was asked to run sound for one of the camps that summer. This is where I learned the most. I had to pack up, set up, troubleshoot a whole live band and P.A. system all by myself. I eventually dropped out of all my high school sports in order to pursue my passion in mixing sound for a living. I spent fifteen or more hours a week mixing different venues at my church every week all on a volunteer basis. The next step was to find a way to make this passion pay the bills down the road.


After I had told my parents about dropping out of sports, they had to know the reasoning behind it. I was on track to play varsity football, basketball and lacrosse all by my junior year of high school. I told them I wanted to work as an audio engineer. I had to explain to them what it really was I wanted to do. After some convincing and a tour of Full Sail, my parents and I both knew this was the place for me to get this career started. At first, I really wanted to pursue my passion in live sound but found an even greater passion in recording. I also thought it would be a lot better to learn as much as I possibly could about audio as apposed to a general education in audio, video, and lighting.

I personally do not play any instruments. As odd as that seems, I feel it brings a different aspect to recording with a band. For example, just the other day, I was recording guitar for one of my good friends. He was extremely focused on playing the correct chords for the song and making it feel right that he did not even notice he was banging his pick on the guitar every time he strummed up. He also was tapping his toe on his flip flop and it was obviously being picked up by the microphones. He could not even believe I heard those things. I feel, if I had been a guitarist, I probably would not even thought twice about his performance but since I am not, I notice small things like that all the time.

I would primarily like to work in a studio after Full Sail. As much as I'm learning here, there is still so much that I need to learn. I feel the only way I will learn a lot of this is to actually practice it over and over. After a few years in a top studio, I would like to open a small studio back home to record a lot of local artists. The music scene in Colorado is usually ignored, but there is so much good music there and I want to help promote it. Anyways, that is a small caption from my past and hopefully my promising future.