When DePaul School of Music Associate Professor Tom Miller entered the music recording business 20 years ago, he started at the bottom, making $1.85 an hour at a local studio where his duties included emptying ashtrays.

     Times have changed for Miller's students, who study in the Sound Recording Technology (SRT) bachelor's degree program at DePaul. Recent graduates have gone to work for Oprah's Harpo Productions, won gold records by recording with singers, edited scores for major motion pictures and earned positions as managers of recording and broadcast studios.

     "It's a good time to be in the music technology business," Miller said. "When I started in the Chicago recording business, there were four recording studios. Now you look in the Yellow Pages and there are 150." In addition to Chicago, Miller said graduates with music technology know-how are in demand in the traditional recording industry centers of Los Angeles, Nashville and New York and in emerging recording hubs such as Seattle and Miami. New jobs in sound design also are being created because of advances in CD-Rom and Internet technologies.

     While opportunities have increased, developing expertise in the field still takes hard work. Students in the program must master traditional musical skills and undergo extensive training in contemporary music technology. "Our program is not easy," Miller said. "Students must take a full slate of musicianship courses, 20 hours of physics, calculus as well as sound recording courses." The four-year program leads to a bachelor's of science degree in music and can include a minor in microelectronics. It is one of only about a dozen such programs in the United States.

     "The idea of the program is to give students a cross section of knowledge that will prepare them for a wide variety of careers in music technology, from recording classical music to multi-track rock and roll to producing sound for interactive CDs and audio for film and television," Miller said. About half of the program's graduates pursue graduate study, often in computer science.

     Miller, who holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in music composition, engineered the recordings of Chicago R&B groups such as the Manhattans and ChiLites and designed sound for thousands of television ads for major companies like McDonalds and Kraft. He joined DePaul's faculty to teach synthesized music at the inception of the SRT program in 1989.

     The program only accepts about 15 students per year to keep the instruction personal and hands-on. Students do much of their work in Studio DePaul, the School of Music's recording studio where they learn how to record live music, create electronic music, score movies and produce surround sound in a digital environment.

     Educational opportunities also include participation in sound recording projects at local concert venues. On May 2, 3 and 4, Miller and his students will record three live concerts performed by trumpeter Tom Harrell and the DePaul Jazz Ensemble at the Jazz Showcase, 59 W. Grand Ave. The best of the recordings will be mixed into a forthcoming compact disc. Students and faculty also recently participated in Electric DePaul, an annual concert of multimedia and electronic compositions and audio/video sound design projects.

     Craig Anderson, a graduate of the program who edited music for films that include "A Civil Action" and "Sleepy Hollow," and served as a technical consultant for "Titanic," said the program taught him to "size up and solve nearly any studio problem in a very short amount of time and that kind of performance turns heads."

     "A motivated student can walk out of the SRT program and into the real world with a very good grasp of nearly any audio career he or she chooses," he said.