We recently connected with Hillary Van Scoy and have shared our conversation below.
Hillary , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
I moved to NYC from the UK in March of 2019 without knowing a single person here. I wanted to further my learning and pursuit of sound engineering, and I knew I’d have a far larger set of opportunities if I came to New York. It’s the centre of everything. I had a small amount of money saved up from working cleaning jobs back in Glasgow, a suitcase with a duvet and some clothes in it, and not much else. I had just started working as an engineer’s assistant sporadically the prior year in Glasgow, Scotland after recording on my own for years in a super stripped-back home setup.
I got a restaurant job within 2 weeks of landing at La Guardia and basically didn’t give up every time a door shut; I’d just move on to something else and keep brainstorming. I applied to heaps of internships, and the one studio where I really wanted to work ended up taking me on; they had a vacancy that timed perfectly within a month of me contacting them. I then got a second internship at another awesome studio, all while working non-music day jobs. These two places have taught me the majority of the (still small but constantly growing) cache of knowledge I have; I never would have been able to jump into the industry and have the luxury of learning and making mistakes if I hadn’t essentially dropped my previous life and gotten on a plane. With a bit of preliminary planning and sacrifice, a lot can be done to change circumstances.
Hillary , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I got into sound engineering via playing music and touring in bands for around 15 years in the UK. It became gradually more useful and even essential to understand the inner workings of live music and recording with every year that went by; having a broader tool kit, even in small doses over a decade ago, helped me accomplish whatever I needed to with music far more effortlessly and with more desired outcomes. From something as simple as understanding how to quickly re-skin and tune a snare drum before a show to more complex concepts like the best mic choices and positions for a chosen room sound during recording or getting cozy with different software, taking the time to learn things on your own can really broaden your horizons! My particular origin story is super common (an interest in engineering spawned from being a musician), but the places and folks I’ve worked for and with aren’t necessarily. If I were to be proud of anything, I think it would be lasting this long and still trying to learn something from every session I’m doing myself or in which I’m working for another engineer; all of the folks I admire in this industry basically never stop taking on new knowledge.
The primary thing I want clients to know is that I want to serve their vision and goals in the best way possible; when everyone listens back to a take in the control room, I want folks to feel like everything is already coming together in a way that makes them happy and proud about their creation.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
The first thing that comes to mind isn’t one particular story, but rather the same type of story that happened repeatedly. Without knowing anything about me or my work history, both back in the UK and in New York, contemporaries and peers would often try to discourage me from pursuing sound engineering by telling me I’d started too late, that I’d never be able to learn enough to do it in any formal capacity, or that I “wasn’t ready” for certain jobs, even though I’d already been doing those jobs for years. I basically just didn’t listen to them and kept going. There have undeniably been people who have always been supportive of me, but it’s often difficult to keep your head up when there are naysayers who aim to plant doubt. If you can see through the super transparent motives for such discouragement, it’s easy to see exactly why you SHOULD be doing what you’re doing, and that discouragement becomes irrelevant. Also, the more you continue to work on getting better at something and branching out, other people with the same mindset will notice you, and you can develop a lot of symbiotic work relationships this way with supper supportive people. Determination finds determination every single time.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
My goal in creating now is the same as it was when I was a little kid, a teenager, a young adult, etc; it’s evolved over time, but never truly changed its core aim! I always knew that life was finite, but the beauty of it was that you can put something out into the universe that isn’t yourself but has your fingerprints. And if that disappears over time as well, at least it existed for a while. Making something and presenting it to the world is always meaningful, no matter how large or small the reception or the thing/act itself. So my goal has always just been to make things- to see them exist, and hope that they can perhaps serve a purpose.
The full idea of being able to aid in other people’s creative visions has always been a simultaneous goal, whether playing an instrument in someone’s project or recording their music for them; it has been really rewarding bringing this into the scope of life in the last decade. I think getting into the world of sound engineering has brought me much closer to making that goal a proper reality.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.studiogbrooklyn.com/hillaryvanscoy
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bloodofthebull/
Image Credits
Photos by Joel Hamilton