Martin Grenier is a graduate of the One-Year General Arts and Sciences Pre-Music Production Program.

For my international study, I decided to immerse myself in Austria. I already secured a host family that was ready to lodge me for my period away from Canada (one of the sons of this family had stayed at my home in Canada for a year as a student exchange with the STS program). I first found out about the scholarship about 3 weeks before I left, so one could imagine how fast and exciting the process was for me.

Fortunately for me, my host family that have a home near Salzburg, have cousins that own and operate a professional level music and tone studio in Vienna, Austria’s capital, called Webros Tone Studios. The fact that Salzburg and Vienna are about a 3-hour train ride apart, gave me the chance to meet many people (which I consider friends now) and to work on divers projects.

The first project I worked on was for an independent rock band in Salzburg at a studio privately owned and operated. I helped with general engineering and expertise. During my stay in Vienna at Webros Tone Studios, I had to opportunity to work on an independent project where I collaborated with the producer as a microphone engineer, a session drummer and technician, a recording engineer (vocal tracks, guitar tracks and MIDI synthesizing) and a mixing/editing engineer. I learned a lot about the different techniques they use in studio and they learned a lot about the different styles, influences and techniques I’ve learned both from Algonquin College and from previous experiences.

English is not the main language of Austria, and I had but a small amount of education in German—so this placement helped me improve both my German skills as well as my French skills. Presently, I can understand about 80% of conversations in German and Austrian, unless they are using a coarser dialect.

Being a music production student, now is the time for me to start or continue building my personal network, and this scholarship helped me acquire a substantial amount of useful contacts not only in Austria, but also in Germany, France, the UK, the Czech Republic and Romania. I would absolutely recommend, even encourage any student in any domain to expand their horizons by working or studying abroad.

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